Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats
John Chambers writes: From The Norton Manual of Music Notation, First Edition (Heussenstamm, | 1987): | | If a passage is to be repeated from the beginning of a piece, only one Yup; and there ain't a whole lot you're gonna do to fight this, unless you can somehow get control of all ABC software and add code to make it illegal. Nor should one even try. As has been pointed out, there's a school of notation out there---Kerr, O'Neill, et. al. which omits initial repeats because they simply aren't necessary...in that particular music. Irish and Scottish dance music, is (uaually) so regular, with such a simple repeat structure (tunes are divided into parts, each part is played once or twice, as the case may be, and on to the next) that the algorithm when you hit a repeat sign, go back to the end of the last part, is sufficient for the vast majority of the tunes; there's no ambiguity. For the exceptions, one can always put in the start-repeats. In fact, most of the old collections only give the bare bones of the tunes: no decorations, second endings are skipped, etc., because the musicians who play them were---and are---are supposed to flesh them out, add gracenotes and variations to taste, and figure out the correct pickup notes when necessary. (Not entirely dissimilar to the situation of figured bass in early music, which came up in another thread.) It might be interesting to check the old collections to see if those arranged with piano accompaniment (which would be more for non-trad players) are more punctilious about begin-repeats. Just to add a couple of data points to John's list, I checked some of the works on my shelves for the use of initial repeats. I'd guess that most of the Irish collections that omit begin-repeats follow O'Neill. But O'Neill himself was very much aware of the significant---and insignificant--collections preceeding him, so it's quite possible he himself adopted the convention from Kerr or someone else. Is there any evidence that this originated before Kerr? Anyway: These used start-repeats: Geoghegan's Tutor for the Pastoral or New Bagpipe, London, ca 1746. (Usually ends lines with the double repeat ::) John Murphy's collection for violin, violincello and pianoforte, (Edinburgh, 1809) Colclough's Tutor for the UP, ca 1830 Scanlon's Gaelic Collection for the violin, (San Francisco, 1930s?) Roche's collection, 1911 Heather Clarke's Tutor for the UP (1988, the standard UP tutor these days. She also uses the naked colon to start repeats which begin a line, a practice probably picked up from Pat Mitchell.) Ceol Rince na h'Eireann (Breathnach's collection, (Dublin, 1963) And a couple which were mentioned already: Cole's (nee Ryan's Mammoth Collection, late 1800s) Krassen's version of O'Neill's (editorial slag: not significant. Krassen corrected O'Neill's errors to make room for his own.) These ones don't: Leo Rowsome's UP tutor, Dublin Armagh Pipers Club Tutor Bulmer and Sharpley (Actually, they used begin-repeats for about the first ten tunes of volume 1, then stopped.) Ceol An Phiobaire, (Dublin, 1971--78) (This is a book of transcriptions, and start repeats are occasionally used to get the pickup notes right.) O'Neill also published collections arranged for the piano, which one might expect to have the begin-repeats spelled out, but the only one I have at hand is his Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody, which doesn't use them. I also checked the more careful of the modern transcriptions, of Patsy Tuohey by Mitchell and Small, and of James Morrison, Michael Coleman, and Paddy Killoran by David Lyth, and, surprise: no begin-repeats...in fact...no repeats at all. Evidently musicians of that calibre repeat a part note-for-note so seldom that repeats aren't worthwhile. I did find a couple in in another collection of careful transcriptions, the Dance Music of Willie Clancy, by Pat Mitchell...tho I had to look hard. The repeats always have begin-repeat attached. Interestingly enough, Mitchell contributed a large number of the tunes in Ceol An Phiobaire, sans start-repeats. There are a couple of peculiarities, already remarked in this thread: begin-repeats which start a staff are marked with a naked colon. The treble clef sign is only on the first staff of a tune, while the key signature heads every staff. When a begin repeat coincides with a barline, and is not at the start of a tune, they write: heavy double barline, key signature, and colon in that order. So that every staff after the first starts with a bar line; then comes the key sig, and after that, the music.) Cheers, John Walsh To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats
John Walsh [EMAIL PROTECTED] asked ... are nested repeats common in serious music?... Muse allows nested repeats because it fell out of the code and would have needed extra work to ban them, but I have never seen any music printed to be played from that actually uses them. I think it would be a disaster. Like John I have heard music go wrong in live performances because musicians couldn't find the start repeat sign in time. On some occasions the wrong notes seemed to be coming from somewhere extremely close to me (at the time though I was too busy trying to find the repeat sign to pay much attention). Laurie To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats
Laurie Griffiths [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: John Walsh [EMAIL PROTECTED] asked ... are nested repeats common in serious music?... Muse allows nested repeats because it fell out of the code and would have needed extra work to ban them, but I have never seen any music printed to be played from that actually uses them. I think it would be a disaster. Like John I have heard music go wrong in live performances because musicians couldn't find the start repeat sign in time. On some occasions the wrong notes seemed to be coming from somewhere extremely close to me (at the time though I was too busy trying to find the repeat sign to pay much attention). I have seen a couple of pieces of music, typeset with NoteWorthy that uses nested repeats. The outer repeats (which covered the entire work) were drawn light, while the inner repeats were drawn bold. The entire work had a (A2B2)2 structure (or similar, I'd have to double-check), so the first two repeat starts were adjacent, and *obviously* different. Laurie To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html -- Buddha Buck [EMAIL PROTECTED] I will not die an ironic death -- Scott Ian, lead singer for the metal band Anthrax, after bioterrorist attacks using anthrax. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
RE: [abcusers] Initial repeats
-Original Message- From: Laurie Griffiths [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 1:39 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats I think it's a bit late for that. May be that's true, but ... Although there are some problems they are not so frequent in practice and there is enough stuff out there that we wouldn't want to re-edit and can't wish it away. ...there's nothing to re-edit because older stuff just doesn't use it. And when some older software complains about new things the people will look for an upgrade. I think we should just live with it. ;-) when will we start with the next major version of ABC-standard? Toni To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats
are nested repeats common in serious music? Serious not meaning classical, just that someone is seriously expected to read it The obvious example is strophic songs. The way these are often transcribed, they are a good case for an extended-repeat notation, because folklorists like to write down small variations in specific stanzas. But there's more to it than that since nearly all ballads have internal repeats within each stanza. As you might represent it with a nested repeat (here without stanza variation): X:1 T:The Outlandish Knight B:Northumbrian Minstrelsy M:6/8 L:1/8 K:Eb [|18:|: B |BcB efe|dBB B2 [1 B |BcB edc|B3- B2:| [2 G/A/|BCB AFD|E3- E2|]:18|] I suppose P: allows for much the same expressive power. Hmm...before even thinking about nested repeats, how about making segnos and codas work? Absolutely. But perhaps nail down the extended-repeat thing first? We seem to covered most of what's involved. === http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ === To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats
My theory is that once upon a time, the repeat sign consisted of two dots (:), and always coincided with a bar line. An interesting theory, but I don't buy it because your symbol is symmetrical and so you can't tell the difference between a start repeat and a end repeat. Suppose your music has the form A |: B :| C |: D :| E you are now in big trouble if you can't tell the difference between a start repeat and an end repeat. Big trouble or not, you do find similar syntax in 18th century Scottish sources, both print (e.g. Aird) and manuscript. They often got by with only symmetric repeat signs. A section was repeated if you could find a repeat sign (or the start of the tune) at each end of it. Effectively the symmetric repeat was the normal double bar, with the simple double bar being a special case indicating *non*-repetition (which is the statistically efficient way to arrange things with that repertoire, since most sections do get repeated). There was a special left repeat sign only used in practice when you had a non-repeating upbeat at the very start. I tried being faithful to Aird's notation in the transcript on my site by using :: repeat signs at the ends of tunes. I think that crashed BarFly with a memory error every time and I didn't expect any other implementation to allow for such lunacy, so out it went. One 18th century layout which is genuinely useful is the ultra- compact tunebook format where tunes don't need to start on a new line (see Rogier's _Oude en Nieuwe Boerenlietjes en Contradansen_ for a well-done example). Lots of manuscripts use that, with a paper size rather larger than A5 in landscape format. This was meant to be pocket-sized for some sufficiently large value of pocket. In that format you need something much more dramatic than a thin-thick bar to mark the end of a tune, so they used a series of parallel vertical lines starting the height of the staff and tapering down to a dot, or in manuscript a damped-harmonic- motion or Bessel function curve with 3 to 6 oscillations. The feature that often went along with this in manuscripts that you possibly don't want abc2ps to support is filling the book from both ends at once, opposite ways up. This was very common and nobody now knows why. === http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ === To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats
I think it's a bit late for that. Although there are some problems they are not so frequent in practice and there is enough stuff out there that we wouldn't want to re-edit and can't wish it away. I think we should just live with it. Laurie - Original Message - From: Toni Schilling [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2001 5:27 PM Subject: RE: [abcusers] Initial repeats Why not use |: and :| for onbar-repeats and /: and :/ for inbar-repeats. Surrounded with whitespace a parser could handle this as separate tokens and it will not conflict with the A/2 syntax. Also you can be explicith now if needed: | /: abc abc | abc abc :/ | abc /: abc | abc :/ abc | Toni To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats
Suppose your music has the form A |: B :| C |: D :| E you are now in big trouble if you can't tell the difference between a start repeat and an end repeat. Didn't think of that... Still, I think it _is_ unfortunate that the repeat sign itself includes a bar line. Erik Ronström __ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats
Erik Ronstr=F6m writes: | Suppose your music has the form | =20 | A |: B :| C |: D :| E | =20 | you are now in big trouble if you can't tell the difference between | a start repeat and an end repeat. | | Didn't think of that... | | Still, I think it _is_ unfortunate that the repeat sign itself includes | a bar line. In some music theory book (I've forgotten which), I once saw the explanation that it's only thin bar lines that are true bar lines. Thick ones are phrase or section markers, and need not coincide with bar lines. The idea was that a thick line plus a colon represented the start of a repeated section, but not a bar line, and could appear anywhere. Thick+thin+colon would be required for the start of a repeat at a bar line, according to this writer. Of course, few if any musicians or printers think of them this way, so that was really just an interpretation of one textbook writer. A bit of a pity, perhaps, because one of the constant problems with much printed music is the difficulty in rapidly spotting the start of a repeat. Using a fat line and big dots helps a lot to make it highly visible to the reader. BTW, if you want to see really insignificant repeat signs, look at the Ryan/Cole collection. A lot of tunes have start-repeat signs that are merely a pair of small dots at the start of the staff. In some cases, they are almost invisible. I don't know why they even bothered printing them. Of course, this is one of many books that uses several repeat conventions. Not surprising in a large collection. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats
Jack Campin writes: repeat signs are bars, I don't think so. At a quick glance, seven out of the first twelve tunes in the Northumbrian Piper's Tune Book have repeat symbols that don't coincide with bars. Strange---I've been writing tunes like this for years, and had never remarked that my repeats/part ends usually didn't coincide with the end of bars. Of course, now you point it out, it's clear--the measure before the repeat is completed by the pick-up notes of the next--or first, or whatever. Duh... You're right about the unnecessary complication, but the convention in sources like Kerr's is absolutely clear. If ABC had a nested-repeat construction there would be an ambiguity, but that's years away. Hmm...before even thinking about nested repeats, how about making segnos and codas work? That's an easier way to handle them. (I have to admit a great fund of ignorance here: are nested repeats common in serious music? Serious not meaning classical, just that someone is seriously expected to read it---the 64-tunes-per- page example sounds a bit frivolous in this sense...) It's easy enough for computers, but nested repeats stretching over a couple of lines of music sounds like a recipe for disaster for human performance. Perhaps that's why the segno sign looks so little like the repeat? By the way, there are also signs for one-measure and two-measure repeats; they might make it pretty simple to write out those tunes which are made up of repeated one and two-bar phrases. (Never tried it, tho.) You can do wonders of compression with nested repeats. A Christmas challenge: find the shortest abc for the music to the Twelve Days of Christmas. (all verses, all extensions suggested in this thread are welcome, of course.) I just looked that tune up in O'Neill's 1001 (it's #972). There is a notational convention there that I really *don't* think we oughta emulate... read a dotted crotchet as a minim??? For this one, he Thanks for that!---I hadn't realized that it was also a set dance. That *is* a nice little bit of syncopation there. It's also #299 in the 1850, but that's less interesting: the beats line up too well. You can do wonders of compression with nested repeats. There is a sheet in Murdoch Henderson's manuscripts titled 64 Great Scottish Reels in A Major, and he gets them all on one side, one line each, 64 lines (the sheet is the size of a folded tabloid page). There's Did he save some space by omitting the key signature at the head of each tune? With that title, he could have. John Chambers writes: BTW, if you want to see really insignificant repeat signs, look at the Ryan/Cole collection. [ ... ] Of course, this is one of many books that uses several repeat conventions. Not surprising in a large collection. And perhaps a sign that it was a cut-and-paste job...? Cheers, John Walsh To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats
Consider standard music notation: My theory is that once upon a time, the repeat sign consisted of two dots (:), and always coincided with a bar line. The bar line was then made thicker or double to point out the ending of the part. Later, the dots have come to be associated with the bar line so that :| is now considered a simple repeat sign, and not a bar line. This is unfortunate, but that is how repeats are used today, and it is unlikely to change. Well, one suggestion (perhaps not very realistic to implement, but interesting, I think) is that ABC returns to what I think is the original use of repeat signs, so that |: denotes a barline AND a repeatsign, while : is used as a mid-bar repeat. Erik Ronström __ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats
On Tue 18 Dec 2001 at 01:00PM +, Erik Ronström wrote: Consider standard music notation: My theory is that once upon a time, the repeat sign consisted of two dots (:), and always coincided with a bar line. An interesting theory, but I don't buy it because your symbol is symmetrical and so you can't tell the difference between a start repeat and a end repeat. Suppose your music has the form A |: B :| C |: D :| E you are now in big trouble if you can't tell the difference between a start repeat and an end repeat. James Allwright To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats
Jack asked whether anybody's software supported only one key signature per tune. Well I don't. Muse has a general policy of trying to do something that is usually acceptable and doing it automatically. This means that it will not please people who want to make their printed page look exactly like someone else's [perhaps they want Paint Shop Pro or a photo copier ;-] but does eliminate a lot of mistakes. Not only does it put a key signature at the start of each line, but in the event of a change which removes some sharps or flats will print to the left of the first key signature of the new key, a natural for each one that has gone away. Of course it's one of those things that I could definitely argue either way - but that was how I felt when I coded that part! Laurie Griffiths http://www.musements.co.uk/muse where you will find music notation software for PCs. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
RE: [abcusers] Initial repeats
Why not use |: and :| for onbar-repeats and /: and :/ for inbar-repeats. Surrounded with whitespace a parser could handle this as separate tokens and it will not conflict with the A/2 syntax. Also you can be explicith now if needed: | /: abc abc | abc abc :/ | abc /: abc | abc :/ abc | Toni To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats
John == John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: John | On Tue 18 Dec 2001 at 01:00PM +, Erik Ronstr=F6m wrote: John | Consider standard music notation: John | My theory is that once upon a time, the repeat sign consisted of two John | dots (:), and always coincided with a bar line.=20 John Anyone have any actualy history of this? The earliest repeats I have facsimiles of are in John Dowland, in the early 17th century. Morley, printing about 10 years earlier, writes out all repeats. Most of the pieces I know from much earlier than that don't have explicitly notated repeated sections, although of course performers may well have decided to repeat things. When there is a begin and end repeat together, Dowland draws it as a double bar line with some number of dots between 2 and 6 on each side of the double bar. This is true both in parts which have other bar lines and in parts which are otherwise unbarred. The ones with barlines use the same sign at the end of the piece, that is with dots on both sides of the double bar. They do not put a repeat sign at the beginning. The parts that are written without barlines don't bother with either the end repeat at the end of the piece or the begin repeat at the beginning of the piece. Where there is a begin repeat in the middle of the piece, for instance with an ABB structure, the end repeat is as described above, but often the beginning of the repeat is indicated by a squiggly cross above or below the note to be repeated to, and not by anything that looks to us like a repeat sign at all. This is not necessarily associated with a barline at all. When there is alternate music for the first time through, there's a double bar separating that from the note that ends the piece on the second time through. There doesn't seem to be a formal idea of a set of notes that might constitute a second ending, although a modern transcription often ends up writing it that way. -- Laura (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] , http://www.laymusic.org/ ) (617) 661-8097 fax: (801) 365-6574 233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139 To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats
repeat signs are bars, I don't think so. At a quick glance, seven out of the first twelve tunes in the Northumbrian Piper's Tune Book have repeat symbols that don't coincide with bars. Okay, I guess both I and the 1.6 standard are wrong on that. For instance, I want to be able to do this - X:1 T:Brighton Camp I:abc2nwc M:4/4 L:1/8 K:G |:gf|e2dc B2A2|B2G2E2D2|G2G2GABc|d4B2gf| e2dc B2A2|B2G2E2G2|FG A2D2EF|G4G2:| |:dc|B2d2e2f2|g2dc BA G2|Bc d2e2f2|g4f2gf| e2dc B2A2|B2G2E2G2|FG A2D2EF|G4G2:| Leaving out the first |: would be no problem but I prefer to keep the second. Insisting that repeat symbols coincide with barlines produces something like - gf|:e2dc B2A2|B2G2E2D2|G2G2GABc|d4B2gf| e2dc B2A2|B2G2E2G2|FG A2D2EF|1G4G2gf:|2G4G2dc|] B2d2e2f2|g2dc BA G2|Bc d2e2f2|g4f2gf| e2dc B2A2|B2G2E2G2|FG A2D2EF|1G4G2dc:|2G4G2|] which is unnecessarily complicated and ambiguous about where the repeat of the second half starts. You're right about the unnecessary complication, but the convention in sources like Kerr's is absolutely clear. If ABC had a nested-repeat construction there would be an ambiguity, but that's years away. I just looked that tune up in O'Neill's 1001 (it's #972). There is a notational convention there that I really *don't* think we oughta emulate... read a dotted crotchet as a minim??? For this one, he did put a repeat at the start of the line (he does it different ways in different places in the same book). Kerr (v3, The Girl I Left Behind Me) puts the whole tune on one line with no initial repeat and a double-sided repeat in the middle, his usual practice for tunes short enough to fit. Does anybody's software support O'Neill's attitude to clefs and key signatures? - one per tune is enough. I think I've seen that in other Irish sources. I don't mind either way. I think I've seen other Irish stuff that dropped the clef at the start too: you assume treble, trusting that St Patrick drove the others out of Ireland. You can do wonders of compression with nested repeats. There is a sheet in Murdoch Henderson's manuscripts titled 64 Great Scottish Reels in A Major, and he gets them all on one side, one line each, 64 lines (the sheet is the size of a folded tabloid page). There's no hint in the manuscripts of why he wanted to do this in the first place. Must have taken him days. === http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ === To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats
Jack Campin says - repeat signs are bars, I don't think so. At a quick glance, seven out of the first twelve tunes in the Northumbrian Piper's Tune Book have repeat symbols that don't coincide with bars. Also, if you want to reorganize the line breaks, you have to edit the adjacent :| and |: signs into a single :: (after all, :||: is illegal). This is a silly timewaster. If you're changing line breaks you shouldn't be forced to change anything *but* line breaks. I can't find anything that says that :||: is illegal. That just follows from assuming they are barlines. I would have thought that the same would apply to section start and end. For instance, I want to be able to do this - X:1 T:Brighton Camp I:abc2nwc M:4/4 L:1/8 K:G |:gf|e2dc B2A2|B2G2E2D2|G2G2GABc|d4B2gf| e2dc B2A2|B2G2E2G2|FG A2D2EF|G4G2:| |:dc|B2d2e2f2|g2dc BA G2|Bc d2e2f2|g4f2gf| e2dc B2A2|B2G2E2G2|FG A2D2EF|G4G2:| Leaving out the first |: would be no problem but I prefer to keep the second. Insisting that repeat symbols coincide with barlines produces something like - gf|:e2dc B2A2|B2G2E2D2|G2G2GABc|d4B2gf| e2dc B2A2|B2G2E2G2|FG A2D2EF|1G4G2gf:|2G4G2dc|] B2d2e2f2|g2dc BA G2|Bc d2e2f2|g4f2gf| e2dc B2A2|B2G2E2G2|FG A2D2EF|1G4G2dc:|2G4G2|] which is unnecessarily complicated and ambiguous about where the repeat of the second half starts. Bryan Creer
