David Rogers wrote:
On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 08:03, Kieren
MacMillan<kieren_macmil...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
I can't remember who in this thread first suggested that when you play an
instrument you "follow the key signature", but this notion is silly — and
ultimately harmful (to music education).
That would be me.
David Rogers wrote:
When *you* play music, you know that you need to follow the key
signature in order to play the correct notes. Lilypond, on the other
hand, *never* follows the key signature - you must always type the
sharp, flat, or natural that you want the musicians to perform, even
if you have already specified it in the key signature.
For the impatient reader: I'm on Kieren's side... :-)
I see your point, I guess. But I'm pretty sure most people on this list
are convinced that LilyPond actually _does_ follow the key signature,
just not the way this very user wants it to be.
LilyPond is built to typeset music as a professional engraver would do.
But it's also about the flexibility in the output. We want to be able to
get MIDI output, part combining, extracts from scores, as well as other,
more fancy stuff.
Suppose I have to - in my view - disregard the key signature, so I have
to write "f" to get an f sharp-sounding note in a piece with key
signature g major.
This means I can't possibly use this music definition for MIDI output,
without specifying the key signature (which is just a shortcut in the
printout, basically), but I have to adapt it accordingly.
I know. It's possible, like we have the \relative command - but it means
an additional and highly non-trivial conversion step, if you consider
everything which can be done in LilyPond.
To me, it's the same as saying: Well, this quarter note is merely a
third of this \time 3/4 measure. So I'll better specify it as a 1/3
note, since I may change the timing (which amounts to transposition in
the pitch context) of this measure later on, but it has to sound the same.
Which is certainly understandable - it's just not how people tend to think.
Okay, you say, I don't want to bother with remembering those few glyphs
at the start of a line. Let's just write "f" instead of "fis", since we
don't see an accidental printed in front of it; we can translate it for
MIDI somehow, using a \relativeKey command or something. But in essence
this means, I'm bothering about when an accidental is necessary myself.
Now assume you want the same melody in another printed context. Say you
want additional cautionary accidentals when writing a tenor voice
together with the bass in the same staff to spare paper (which, by the
way, also probably means that the clef changes, so you can't refer to
"the second staff line" or something), but you also want to be able to
get a version with one staff per voice, where the cautionaries are
merely confusing.
Right. You can write a converter. But even with this you were forced to
always reinterprete and re-evaluate your _own_ input when tweaking the
score, w.r.t. the printed version you just happen to have lying around.
I'm a very enthusiastic fan of not forcing people to think the way
machines do, but the other way around.
But this just sounds plainly wrong to me.
Cheers,
Alexander
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