I just got an e mail from a Musica Viva visitor asking for Croatian
traditional music for flute. Is anybody here able to help?
Does this person have a specific piece in mind?
I don't think so. As I understand it, he's an American of Croatian
origin who wanted to learn something about his ancestry. He probably
don't know of a single Croatian tune at the moment.
I have a thumping great book of Croatian tunes but I'm hardly going
to start typing the whole lot in to meet this request...
To explain what I've got: the book is Vinko Zganec, _Narodne Popijevke
Hrvatskog Zagorja_ (1950). It's an ultra-scholarly collection of song
tunes with a few instrumental pieces at the end. Everything is
classified up the wazoo, which is probably why Francis Collinson had
it - it came from his collection, it's an autographed copy. Collinson
was an obsessional classifier; the book even has his own personal
library catalogue number pencilled in.
The classificatory annotations are way beyond ABC, but have textual
equivalents. The music often uses compound rhythms with bars broken
into subunits, but otherwise there isn't anything wildly complicated
about it, except that some of the instrumental pieces use single-line
percussion staves with up/down noteheads to distinguish the hands (an
extension I proposed to ABC years ago, which doesn't seem all that
complex either for a player or a formatter, but which no implementor
has yet gone for).
I just did one, but I can't email it except as an attachment; it's
a simple dance tune with an optional text. There are two Croatian
letters; no problem using ASCII equivalents there. The problem is
in the underlay. It has an isolated letter k which goes *in
between* two notes - it would be assimilated in speech. The only way
I could see to represent that was by using a Macintosh non-breaking
space (character $CA) to glue it on to the following word. BarFly
processes that okay and the score it generates looks just like it
should, but ASCII has no such character and hence, as far as I know
(I haven't used w: much) ABC has no such functionality. Nor, as far
as I know, does email portably encode a nonbreaking space, so I'm
pretty well snookered.
I can't be arsed linking a single tune unrelated to anything else
into my website. If anybody wants this, given that attachments in
this list are out, contact me and I'll pass it on with a GIF and
some sound files to point out the problem.
(I should perhaps add that my total knowledge of Croatian is a few
isolated words and the phrases I love you and fuck your mother -
I'm having to guess what features might be important in transcription).
If anybody tries doing songs in Russian they're going to hit the
same snag with knobs on. An isolated v assimilated to the
following word occurs in almost every nontrivial Russian text.
If I was in the Croatian-American flute player's position I'd try to
pick the tunes up by ear off recordings anyway.
=== http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ ===
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