Why don't we get rid of \chordmode?

[David Kastrup]

Hi, from a user perspective, chordmode is unnecessary and restricted.
You can't combine different voices (in particular for adding bass
notes), you can't write chords and bass notes together, you can't put
non-chorded material in between, relative mode is not possible (like for
chord progressions) and so forth and so on.

But when specifying a chord with colon syntax, the input can't be
confused with a normal music expression.  The only distinguishing
feature of chordmode is that specifying a pitch _without_ colon will
generate a major triad, and that the octave is one higher than normal.

That's not enough of a distinction to keep it around.  Just let normal
music mode accept chords with : notation, and \chordmode is unnecessary
and can be deprecated.

ly-convert can then turn \chordmode into \transpose c c' and make sure
that every pitch spec has a colon attached to it: c: is a legal chord
specifier.

To make this slightly prettier, one can reserve the modifier M
(uppercase) for "major", then c:M can be written for a major chord,
looking slightly better than just c: would.

-- 
David Kastrup