Before this becomes something other than the trivial pursuit that it is, let's lay it to rest once and for all.
Tablature is notation. Every dictionary and encyclopaedia I can access, physical and online agrees. Music notation on staves with noteheads, in fact, can be considered a kind of tabliture, in fact. However, music notation is simply a system for indicating how to play music. Any system. Tablatures, successive fingering diagrams, staff-and-notehead-and-flag/stem, the lot. While tablatures are not _limited_ to plucked instruments, the statement is utterly accurate that David Raleigh Arnold wrote: > > "Tablature notation is used for notating music for plucked string instruments. It >notates pitches not by using note heads, but by indicating on which string and fret a note must be played." > Although the statement can be taken to be exclusive or absolute, it is not either. > Seemingly a minor matter, but troublesome, producing wrong thinking, and leading to >mistakes already. Tablature is not notation. The claim 'tablature is not notation' is the actual inaccurate statement, leading to wrong thinking. (Notation is not notation because it uses 'notes': notes are called notes because they were a form of notation that became common and wanted a name for the entities. Notes can also be jotted letters on a pad, informative marginal entries, or many other things: are these things all music?) Moreover, the real question is whether the definition proffered originally meets the description of the tablature that Lilypond is currently capable of making. It does. If we're going to get tautological about tablature in a manner that is effective where lilypond is concerned, it might be more useful to consider how we're going to be differentiating harmonica tablature from German organ tablature from wind instrument graphic fingering representations from line-and-number tabs like Lily does now. Unless the mechanism for notating (and perhaps the mechanism by which the objects are selected and placed?) is uniform, this is where differentiating and delineating will be of importance. raybro _______________________________________________ Lilypond-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
