Re: Accidentals: Unwanted naturals

[David Rogers]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 21:14, David Raleigh Arnold<address@hidden> wrote:
> On Saturday 29 August 2009, Kieren MacMillan wrote:
>> David,
>>
>> > The key signature is and has been for many centuries
>> > an integral part of the notation.
>>
>> Yes... and now you're suggesting we make it *not* integral — your
>> argument holds no merit.
>
> No. I'm stating outright that you make the key signature
> musically irrrelevant now, because changing the key signature has no
> effect on the pitch of the notes. Your argument refutes your
> own case.  Try to be more rational, please.  Regards, daveA


He is being perfectly rational. So are you. You're both right, in
musical terms; you're just coming at the problem from different points
of view - one is (essentially) visually-oriented, the other
sound-oriented. Obviously, music scoring involves both, which is why
you're both right.

Lilypond, however, is clearly set up from only one of those points of
view, namely the sound-oriented one. It doesn't really matter; things
had to be set up some way, one way got chosen, and that's pretty much
it. Trying to change it now would be an uphill battle, to put it
mildly.

David, your logic makes perfect sense.
But the way Lilypond is set up, ALSO makes perfect sense. You'll get
more music done if you just learn to live with it, or use a different
piece of software altogether. Just the gymnastics that would be
involved in trying to get the modified scores to transpose would be
bad enough - and I'm sure that's just the most obvious problem.

AFAIK, all of the graphical-interface music scoring programs use the
visually-oriented logic. I think it makes sense that Lilypond, as a
text-interface scoring program, might be expected to rely on
sound-oriented logic, since its graphical facilities are, umm, skimpy.
:-)

Hope that made sense.

The Other David
(with a blue helmet on, not shooting much...)  :-)