Re: Possible feature request for 'q' shorthand or tie syntax

[David Kastrup]

Jim Long <address@hidden> writes:

> On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 01:12:29PM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
>> Jim Long <address@hidden> writes:
>> 
>> > For that matter, it would be nice (though I suspect more
>> > syntactically problematic) for subsequent notes in ties to only
>> > require a duration, since by definition the pitch has already been
>> > specified in the first note of the tie.
>> 
>> Yes and no: musically one can tie eis to f or cis to des (not that
>> LilyPond does a fabulous job with that).
>
> My wording was somewhat accidental, but I'll point out 'require'.
> Point taken re: your note about bar lines, bar number checks, etc.
> And I don't have any resource to fund development, nor is this an
> urgent issue.

Please don't get me wrong: just because I thankfully accept funds for
keeping me going on LilyPond development does not mean that you can
change my opinion about what is a bad idea in that manner.  Politicians
tend to get generous salaries to prevent them being corruptible.  That
approach does not work with me even though actually my life depends on
it.  So it is really not a question of "funding development" in such a
case, rather one of convincing me that it is a good idea if I am
supposed to implement it.

> That said, what about making the pitch *optional* in a tie?

A tie does not have a pitch.  It is just something attaching to the
previous note.

> So you could still do enharmonic ties:
>
> c1 ~ | bis4 cis dis cis ~ | des1
>
> But if stand-alone durations (like a '4' standing by itself)
> could inherit the previous pitch (somewhat symmetric to how a
> stand-alone pitch inherits the previous duration), one could
> write:
>
> c1 ~ | 4 cis dis cis ~ | 1

So is c4 c c 2 the same as c4 c4 c2 or as c4 c4 c4 c2 ?  We can already
leave _off_ the duration, so if a duration occurs after a pitch, is the
pitch a note without explicit duration followed by a duration without
pitch, or are pitch and duration to be combined?

> Given that q works so well in chordmode, is it rather non-trivial to
> make 'q' work for single notes?  Actually, I just read Marc Kohl's
> post about using q in comping notation, and I see his point.

q was _explicitly_ changed to _only_ repeat chords _after_ extensive
discussion.  The first approach was repetition of _both_ notes and
chords, and people were not happy with it.

> Perhaps a separate letter could be used to refer to the previous note,
> say perhaps p in this example?

Note names should be short enough on their own to make this not really
worth the trouble.

>> Personally, I rather like the ambiguous nature of shifted Renaissance
>> mostly rhythms expressed without the use of ties, but of course it is
>> not really fancied in modern notation.
>
> Please link to an example, I'd be curious to take a look.

I find that an embarrassingly large number of scores is mangled with
modern conventions.
<URL:http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ftp/JanequinC/Oyseaux-Endfassung/Oyseaux-Endfassung-a4.pdf>
has a few minor examples in the tenor.  Usually composers like Orlando
di Lasso, John Dowland and Josquin des Prez are chock full of those
non-tied notes crossing bar boundaries, but if they have been pulled
through Finale etc, this does not appear to be the rule.

-- 
David Kastrup