Re: formal requests

[Mats Bengtsson]

address@hidden wrote:
> ...
> 2. Chord symbols should NOT be tied to any set of pitches, as this is
> the completely wrong way to think about the symbol - they should be
> just that, symbols. And any system BUT ignatzek, please. Since there
> can be no compromise on what system should be used, we should have a
> free-for-all format where you somehow specify something like:
>
> Letter name - superscript -subscript - numbers - slash (if you want
> it) - more numbers/letters, with the circles and triangles and slashes
> available if you want to use those. This doesn't help much, but if you
> really want to know who does it right, look at how Finale handles it.
> I think pretty much all jazz lead sheets these days are typeset with
> Finale, if for no other reason than you get any chord symbol you want,
> without the program forcing you into the "right" set that it thinks
> you should use.

You can always use text markup
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.4/Documentation/user/out-www/lilypond/Text-markup.html#Text-markup
to typeset any kind of chord symbol (the same mechanism is actually
used internally to typeset the predefined chord symbols in LilyPond).
If you want all the chord symbols vertically aligned, you could
insert them into a Lyrics context, since \markup{...} can be used
instead of ordinary text strings as syllables.

Regarding your request to decouple the chord symbols from any kind of
musical semantics (i.e. interpreting them as a particular combination
of pitches), we have had exactly the same discussion about the support
for figured bass in LilyPond. In that situation, it seems that most
people agree that the current solution where LilyPond only supplies a
kind of drawing board for figured bass without any musical 
interpretation, is reasonable, since there were so many different
conventions during the baroque era and the figured bass was just used
as a kind of rough stonegraphy anyway. When it comes to chord symbols,
it seems that most users are happy with the current solution with
predefined chord notation according to a few standards.

    /Mats