Re: Tie issues

[David Raleigh Arnold]

********* Feature request:
Hidden accidentals. If accidental forcing always acted as a toggle for
the individual note, all things would be possible with less fuss. My
apologies if this is already done. ***********

=====Scott Ballantyne:
All accidentals end at the bar line, and therefore need to be repeated
on untied notes in a new bar.
----------yhs
You contradict yourself. If an accidental has to be repeated, it has
been cancelled implicitly. But there is no implicit cancellation if the
accidental extends to the barline. Also the idea of implicit
cancellation is nonsense.

All notes are f or fis. Key C. 4/4
This example is not incorrect, but the repeated tied note is considered
by the large majority to be f-natural:

    ___
   /   \
 #O  |  o   o   |
     |  |   |   |
            | = this note *should* be fis, because all accidentals end
at a barline. There *would be* no ambiguities whatever if this were the
case. Unfortunately, this is a minority view. Therefore the standard
practice contradicts the accepted rule. There is no satisfactory way of
unraveling this knot. A serious problem arises with octaves and primes
in other parts, or even in the same part.

This discussion has been beneficial to me. Again I have learned a lot. I
now understand why Villa Lobos, with Schott, emulated Alexander the
Great in this way:

    1.                   2.                3.
    ___                 ___               ___
   /   \               /   \             /   \
 #O  | #o   o   |    #O  | #O    |     #O  |  o  no   |
     |  |   |   |        |       |         |  |   |   |

This is not my idea. I am confident that I will not find any better
way of cutting Mr. Knot.

Please to note that the first two *are* standard practice at a line or
page break, and ought to be implemented will he nill he in those cases.

Hopefully, simply forcing the sharp on the tied note would preclude
repeating the accidental on the repeated note anyway, so I hope no
additional coding is required. It should *always* be possible to force
an accidental, since extras have never been illegal. It follows that it
must also always be possible to hide an accidental to get any use out
of that feature.

========== Tim Nelson
         Might be an idea if you started a "bestpractise.ly" file which
 switches on the appropriate features (that would give you a chance to
 influence us all with your weird habits :) ).  Of course, you'd want to
ask
 Han-Wen if he'd include it in the source.
----------- yhs
I don't think that you are quite serious, but I don't think that that
would work with more complex music. Primes, octaves, polytonality and
multiple parts all present problems. There is no agreement about the
persistence of accidentals between parts. It is standard practice to
repeat an accidental if the same note occurs in a measure in a different
part. It is also common not to do so. The writing of extra parts may
sometimes be an easier way of working with collisions and stem
direction, and if the accidentals interact between parts there is no
sure way of implementing any such practices at all, whether you like
them or not.

========== Werner Icking:
The greatest mistake in this context is IMHO that some readers seem
to believe that accidentals within a bar do not belong only to
the note they preceed but to all octaves. So editors revoke accidentals
never written. Again Bach's handwriting shows that this problem is
solved
by Bach depending on the context.
-----------yhs
I trusted Willy Apel for Bach's flat. I guess coming to America drove
him crazy. The point of course is that things ain't what they used to
be.

That's why I like parentheses for unnecessary accidentals, accidentals
corresponding with the key on primes in a single part, and accidentals
after a key signature which might inadvertently be seen to change the
key.

When you have polytonality, the context doesn't work, but persistence
does. With serial music, you are absolutely right that persistence of
accidentals makes no sense, and if I wrote serial I would want it off
too.

============Peter Chubb
In music written since the early 19th century this is in fact the case
--- an accidental applies to all subsequent notes of the same name on
the same stave whatever the octave until the next bar line.
-------yhs
Whoa! Since the early 19th century and until when? The most recent
example of that I saw was publ. in the 50's, and it may well have been a
typo. Fortunately that idea is quite extinct. I think it's lifetime was
roughly contemporary with that horrible quarter rest that looked like a
reversed Z.
Again, it is standard practice to repeat an accidental if the same note
occurs in a measure in a different part. It is also common not to do so.
The justification is that it is rational to consider parts as if they
were being played by different people, whether they are or not. This
makes sense to me. How many cited examples relate to this?

You guys are a class act. It is a privilege to learn from you.

It is a problem that musical authorities are:
        1) Always wrong.
        2) Never in doubt.
Is there a causal relationship here? :-)

.daveA
---------------
This apparently didn't make it on the first try...