On Oct 19, 7:41, Han-Wen Nienhuys <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
> > > just influences the coming \key commands.
> >
> > I'm wondering if this is really the best way to do this. It struck me
> > as somewhat roundabout. There is a property called keymodality that
> > is set to shift the interpretation of keys. This creates a kind of
> > unnatural context dependent behavior.
>
> I agree, although the whole concept of key could be called unnatural
> context behavior.
Well, the question of what's "natural" can be discussed for ever, but
I think that in Western music, the folk music, the music of the
people, the music which nonmusicians sing and so on---all of this
music is diatonic. I have read that perception of music is actually
relative to the tonic note. This makes it seem to me like the
(context dependent) concept of key is really quite natural. Once you
have picked a tonic note, everything is relative to that, so the
context dependence is built into human perception. Having different
notations for essentially the same scale seems unnatural because it
doesn't fit with human perception. As a singer, I can't tell a C
scale from a C# scale, so why should the latter one have notes covered
with sharp symbols? This doesn't tell me what I need to know. There
is information in the accidentals. If I have to write all the sharps
and flats out, then the actual information is hidden. (I personally
think that it is a deficiency of LilyPond that if I want to enter
music in some key, I have to explicitly specify all of the sharps or
flats. I usually forget and have to add them after I look at the
output.)
I'm not sure if there's some clear notion for what is meant when
someone says "the key of A". (Is major or minor intended?) But I
don't think there's a natural context dependence here like there is
for note names in a given key.
