Re: Jazz chord chaos

[Rune Zedeler]

Jeff Henrikson wrote:

> Think of an analogy with TeX.  TeX is the best system of math notation that 
> anyone has formalized into a typesetting system.
> Nobody ever said TeX had to _understand_ its equations.  Just typeset them.  
> There are plenty of programs which are capable of
> writing equations, simplifying expressions, coming up with proofs, etc, but 
> these fall totally outside the abstraction barrier of
> TeX.

The difference between TeX and music is that everybody agrees about the
"performance" of math; nobody agrees about the performance of the music.
If you just have the math-symbols, then you are able to "backtrack"
exactly what the writer meant. This does not hold in music. The only way
you can be sure what the writer meant is by the notes, themselves.

> My position: no style files.  No modern-jazz.ly vs traditional-jazz.ly vs 
> berklee-jazz vs whatever-jazz.  The concept is
> ill-concieved.  Please just make a basic system that allows one to 
> parenthesize, alter, invent a few simple chord typographies and
> leave it at that.  And let MIDI representation rest in peace.  Kludging your 
> system of mapping voicings to chord symbols is a very
> bad idea.

I don't agree.
It is true that "blocking" piano-chords out in midi output is stupid and
useless... But if one has a midi-keyboard with auto-accomp, then
midi-chords suddenly make sense. Perhaps one could expand the notation
by i.e. allowing silent notes appearing in the notation but not in the
midi-output and extra-notes appearing in midi-output but not in
notation.
One of the things I like about lily is the configurable layout. You are
trying to eliminate that. If one guy prefers Maj7 and send me a .ly,
then I will have a really hard time converting this to triangle. Perhaps
I would even have problems converting B to H.
As lily works today I just put my favorite chord-file in my local .ly
dir, - and include it into whatever music I download from the web.
Removing this possibility really would be a pity.

-Rune