>| I've never seen the K:HP or K:Hp implemented. Has anyone else?
>| (That's Highland Bagpipe: HP=no key sig but an implied key of 2 sharps,
>| Hp=key sig of 2 sharps + 1 natural and both force stems downwards for
>| the tune).
> Yeah; abc2ps (and probably any clone) implements it fully.
>
> K:Hp has always been one of my favorite examples of the usefulness of
> advisory accidentals in a key signature. Without the =g in the
> signature, there's a very real risk that musicians will quickly
> figure out that a tune is in A, and will "correct" the obvious typo
> in the key signature to three sharps. Adding the =g in the keysig
> makes it clear even to classical musicians that it's not a typo.
BarFly does it that way too and I'm pretty sure ABCMus does. But
unfortunately it's not quite orthogonal enough to the rest of ABC
for a few examples of pipe music:
(1) some of the very earliest pipe music was written with the six-
finger note being D rather than A and the key signature having
one sharp (if written at all). This transposing scheme is
eminently sensible if your intended readership is fluteplayers,
as it was at the time. Breton pipe music is sometimes written
in two flats with Highland-pipe-style typesetting conventions:
i.e. at pitch, which is also a good idea if you expect players
of other instruments to jam along. But ABC doesn't have any way
to generate the pipe-style stemming (melody note stems down,
gracenote stems up) while retaining a free choice of signature.
(2) David Glen's collections of 1890-1910ish pull a truly neat trick.
Pipers are going to ignore the key signature anyway, so he directs
it at people playing the music on the piano. Some pipe tunes
sound like shite if you play them in two sharps on an equally-
tempered instrument, and especially if you're trying to harmonize
them as well. So his key signatures range from nothing (A minor)
to three sharps (A major), and by and large they work.
Both of those could be handled if HP were something other than a key
signature in ABC. In the first case it's a typesetting directive, in
the second case it's also forcing an instrument-dependent interpretation
of the key signature at playback time. Either way a signature like
K:D Mixolydian HP
or
K:C Dorian Hp
would handle it.
And much more importantly
(3) This goes for ordinary pipe tunes too. In the Aird examples
Bruce pointed to, I used Hp signatures to signal that the pitch
set of the tune (range as well as signature) was that of the
pipes. But I'd have preferred to state the mode as well, like
K:D Major Hp
If this were available in ABC I'd use it in every pipe tune
I transcribed.
If there were two separate ways to indicate bagpipeness - one saying
what the pitch set was, another indicating the typesetting convention
to use - some new possibilities would open up. A header line saying
"typeset this as for the pipes" is not the only kind of idiomatic
typesetting you might want: for example, vocal music usually has a
separate flag for each individual syllable, which looks unreadable
to a fluteplayer, so a "flute" typesetting style might beam these
regardless of what beaming the ABC source implied, and a "vocal"
style might break beams according to what the w: lines implied. And
there are books of tunes for the bellows pipes which only differ from
fiddle tunebooks in the stem direction. Being able to name "vocal",
"pipe" or "generic instrument" typesetting styles and invoke them at
a single point in the tune (or file) header would make it quicker to
create custom scores to keep specific classes of musician happy.
(I guess this is like CSS, which is something I haven't really tried
to learn yet).
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<http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes,
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