>| I play a lot of folk dance music which consist of phrases of 8 bars.
>| When linebreaks are every 4 or 8 bars, this makes the score more
>| readable.
> I think that dance musicians usually really like having the phrases
> aligned this way, but most other musicians don't see the benefit
> (and some vehemently dislike it).
Another class of people who use it a lot is highland pipers. For
their scores, there are usually about as many gracenotes as melody
notes, and it can get visually difficult to figure out what's going
on (particularly in the setting where most pipers use tunebooks,
with the music on a table some distance away while working with a
practice chanter). So they line up the beat notes vertically; it's
a bit like the way columns of decimal numbers are usually laid out -
gracenotes to the left of the invisible beat line and melody notes
to the right of it. I do the same with ABCs of Highland pipe music,
since the {...} notation creates the same sort of visual jitter that
pipe gracenotes do.
Look at the G.S. MacLennan tune collection on my site for some
samples; GS was one of the main creators of the modern gracenote-
heavy piping style. (The typesetting of the collection he edited
himself didn't do it, though - it came later, presumably after some
army piping instructor realized that GS-induced eyestrain was an
avoidable occupational hazard).
> I've occasionally wondered whether Jack Campin gets similar flames.
> His abc is very nicely aligned vertically, making the structure of
> the music really obvious. This just has to offend some people ...
Most are along the lines of "why didn't you tell me Windows Notepad
could do that?", which induces a feeling like an author must get when
told their novel has been adopted as a sacred text by a cult devoted
to child sacrifice.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760
<http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes,
Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM "Embro, Embro".
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