=======HWN:
But we do not have the authority to
change the old (and bad) ways of notation.
-----------
Yes you do. Who else? The people who wrote Finale didn't hesitate. The
difference is that you care.
Some of the most sanctioned old standard ways turn out to be more or
less standard and more or less observed and utterly impossible to
implement. Read puts to work the archaic rule of having one slur stand
for many in a beamed situation on p268 ex15-18. To avoid that nonsense,
Schott did this:
=======
| __ |
|/ \ |
*| *|
|* |*
| \__/|
| |
=======
These two voices could have been written in one part easily, if they had
been willing to simply draw two slurs under a single beam! There was
another part besides, so they had to make the beams thinner to fit. They
stopped short of snapping the slurs to the beams in this case. :-) They
must have felt very clever in avoiding breaking the "let one slur stand
for all" rule, without supporting it. They were not morons. It only
seems that way because everything was *ad hoc*. They didn't care about
the what ifs. You are wasting your time caring about anything else but
the what ifs.
What if there are three slurs instead of two? You're broken. Look at the
4th drawing (of 7 in the example(s) cited) Do you really want to
implement this? You have. I wish you hadn't. It would be far better just
to draw the slurs and ties with *precision*, an option not available to
the engravers, and let them ride up the stems as far as they have to,
moving the beams. If the tie and slur in the 6th example began at the
same point (after a unison in this example, I do not contradict
myself--this time :-)), the meaning would be crystal clear instead of
being a stupid puzzle dependent on knowing an archaic bad rule. How
would you like to have to read that mess?
==========
| ___
|/____
|/____
|/
|C -------------staff line
B|
|A ------------staff line
How do you do 3 ties or slurs on beamed notes ABC? You draw them and
move them up the stem past the noteheads. None of the rules, whether
inferred from examples or stated in books, will provide you with a way
nearly as good, or for that matter, *any way at all*. The experts
carefully avoid questions that they can't answer.
You need to stop working with best_case rules, and not attempt to
support rules which don't hold up. See if they break before building
them in, the way you try to do with code. You are beating yourselves up.
You are hitting yourselves on the head. I really fear that this is going
to take a lot longer than twenty years, unless you become more
selective. Is there a better way of getting the right stuff than an open
dialogue? What is it?
=======HWN:
(I think [the latter] is abuse of notation, BTW).
-------
But I hope you agree that the former is a far worse one. I think that
the latter is necessary. Some things would become, unnecessarily, very
complex without it. :-)
==========JN
What's in a number?
-----------
I appreciate the history and the perspective. There's some music out
there that looks funny now, though. ;-)
--
Peace, understanding, health and happiness to all beings!
U U u ^^ ` 'U u U ''`'`
_-__o|oO|o-_|o_o_-_MN[-->mm@_-_--___o|o|oU_|o_o__lilypond
dave N Va USA David Raleigh Arnold [EMAIL PROTECTED]
