> On 16 Oct 2017 20:38, "Ken Williams" <kena...@gmail.com> wrote: > I honestly did not expect this kind of response, and I'm getting it from > multiple people. I asked a technical question and got a whole bunch of > "answers" saying I'm stupid to try to achieve that effect. Except for > Kieren hinting that it will probably be difficult, there has been *zero* > actual discussion about the technical aspects of it. > > If LilyPond or its community isn't friendly to people who want to > experiment with notation, I guess I'm finding that out pretty quickly.
John Zorn once said (paraphrasing from memory), "The job of a composer is to put something on paper that inspires the people playing it." I really love this. It reminds us that a musical score is a communication -- a relationship. If the score compromises its communication by being unclear -- if the players have to divert mental energy into reinterpreting the written material -- it takes energy away from inspiration and hurts the performance. (Relatedly, composers like Ferneyhough use the difficulty of their notation itself to create a relationship where the performers' struggle to realize the demand becomes part of the energy of the performance.) I can see how some of the comments on this thread came across like, "You're doing it wrong," and this could seem like hostility toward the idea of experimenting with notation. I read it a bit differently. The commenters are expressing concern that you may have unpleasant surprises when you get into rehearsal. Some expressed this with sarcasm, which usually doesn't come across well in e-mail. But I think the motivation is sound: Choose the notation that will convey the meaning with the least chance of misunderstanding, at the very least saving rehearsal time, and also freeing up the performers to *make music* rather than think about notation. hjh _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user