RE: Fis or not fis, that is the question.

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

address@hidden writes:
> I query only the particular reasoning behind the rationale currently
> employed, especially since we occasionally get readers that pose this very
> question from time to time and, thus far, I have not seen an answer to
> convince me to the bottom of my heart of the fundamentals behind the method
> chosen.

There is a very easy reason: the musical meaning of music expressions
should be context-free. If the pitch of a note is dependent on context
(the setting of \key), you cannot do anything pitch-based
(eg. transposition) with musical expressions. For example,

     \apply #SCHEME-FUNCTION

becomes a lot less useful if the pitch of a note cannot be deduced.

> Being a fundamentalist at heart, I hate to see apparent redundancy in
> anything, and I have to say that my heart says that to have a key including

The redundancy is in the \key statement. \key can be deduced from the
musical content. The key signature is a way to notate certain scales
using less symbols: it is part of the notation, not of musical
content. Music notation is full of strange rules, exceptions, etc. I
do not want to import all the brokenness of notation into  the musical
representation format.

> Which I am happy to go with, as I have for a number of months now...
> My 3 pennyworth....

Indeed. Or you can write your own engravers that do what you suggested
in your e-mail. In any case, I propose to end this discussion.

-- 

Han-Wen Nienhuys   |   address@hidden   |   http://www.cs.uu.nl/~hanwen