Arabic music half flat accidental shape

[josephHarfouch]

Hi, 

I am a fairly new user of Lilypond, and this is my first post. I am very
excited to have come across this wonderful product, and I am very grateful
to its creators. I am excited in particular about its potential use to
notate Arabic music, given the flexibility that its offers. 

I have seen some discussions in this forum regarding the expansion of
microtonal music that Turkish music, for example, would make use of, and
some of these discussions also mentioned Arabic music. Just for interest, I
think an expansion of notating microtones is not really relevant for Arabic
music as it is traditionally notated up till now, as there is usually no
attempt in Arabic music notation to define intervals smaller than a
semitone. There are however intervals in some Arabic maqams (or modes) that
are somewhat between a tone and  a semitone, and these can be indicated by
using half-flat and half-sharp notation. The precise quality of all
intervals, whether tones, semitones, or medium intervals,  is determined by
the maqam (mode) name and/or by listening to the music. Since lilypond
already offers a way to notate half sharp, and half flat, it already can be
used without modification to notate Arabic music. There are a couple of
things however, that I would like to be able to do. I'm not sure whether
they are available, but I just don't know how to use them, or if they might
be developed in the future. If they are not available, and it would not be
too difficult or costly to add them, then I would be interested to help
sponsor them. 

1) The shape of the half-flat symbol that I see in Lilypond output looks
like a reversed b, which I see in Turkish pieces but not in Arabic music. A
half flat in Arabic music is displayed as a b but with a slash across (It is
hard to describe the shape precisely). Is it possible to access such a
symbol, and if not, is it possible to add it in the future? 

2) This second request is not as important, but it just would be nice to
have, if it is easy to implement. 

It would be nice to be able to omit the name pitch on the \key command, and
let lilypond default it. 

for example instead of saying \key do \minor, 

to say instead 

\key \default \minor 

or even better 

\key \minor 

and then have lilypond default to the notename pitch of do, rather than
issue a syntax error. Lilypond would determine the tonic that by knowing the
associations between modes and default tonics, or simply defaulting to do
when that is not available. 

This does not seem like a very useful thing in Western music where most
scales are thought of as modulations of common scales, but in Arabic music
there are lots and lots of modes to be learned and remembered which are not
always grouped by modulation. The name of the mode or a group of modes
usually implies the name of the tonic. In this case it would to nice to
define this once in a file, and let the software manage it. For example when
an Arabic music is labelled as Maqam Bayati the tonic is assumed to be RE
(D), and the clef key markings reflect this. If the mode is modulated from
its default tonic to another note say sol (G), only then the music is
labelled as Bayyati on sol and the clef markings are adjusted. 

Many Thanks


Joseph Harfouch     

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