Re: sharping naturals

[Thomas Morley]

2015-08-10 3:05 GMT+02:00 David Raleigh Arnold <address@hidden>:
> On Thu, 23 Jul 2015 11:33:50 -0500
> Brother Gabriel-Marie <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> When you use key signatures like A major or B Major you end
>> up with a lot of naturals in the score for which you may
>> have to manually add sharps.
>>
>> Is there a switch that will automatically sharp all the
>> naturals?
>> I was looking at this:
>> http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/notation/displaying-pitches#automatic-accidentals
>>
>> This was the closest I could see:
>> \accidentalStyle modern
>>

Hi Rale,

I hesitated to post in this thread for some reasons.

One reason was, I had no clue what it was about. I simply did not
understand the question.

In an earlier post David Kastrup wrote about different thinking about
note-names due to language and culture. It really helped me to
understand that Brother Gabriel-Marie expected
{ key a \major c }
to print what I'd call a cis.
I never ever would have had that expectation, but after David K's post
I can understand the thinking, at least.

Let me quote this part of his post again:

2015-07-24 14:20 GMT+02:00 David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
[...]
> LilyPond's notename philosophy happens to be from a culture remote from
> the English speaking world.  In Dutch or German, you never, ever, would
> call a "cis" anything other than "cis".  It's not a "c sharp", namely
> some qualified "c".  That's a totally different note and name.  There is
> no such thing as a "c natural" when talking about notes.  It's either
> "c" or not.  You don't need to specify the key signature when discussing
> a chord: all note names are absolute.  Always.
>
> LilyPond is internationalized in that it offers English notenames, but
> it does not offer the accompanying notename philosophy.  And the
> fuzziness coming with such a philosophy is not helpful in the context of
> a computer description of music, so it's not all that likely that this
> will ever change.
[...]

I'd suggest you read it again und try to understand.

> The developers have resisted this from the beginning, because
> they don't realize how easy it would be.

I really doubt.

> There may be also a
> certain contempt for the user or composer who is not expected to
> know what key he's in.

This is bullshit, sorry.

> There are editing tools which will add the
> chromatic signs for you. I posted one on this list some time ago,
> a bash script using sed. Nicholas Sceaux has written one. It may
> be that the Garibaldi editor will do it, I don't know.
>
> The appropriate notes are sharped or flatted unless there is an
> "n" or any other chromatic sign. That's it. Simple, fault
> tolerant, and not requiring any changes at all to the many
> choices already present in lilypond.
>
> \follow {} has been suggested as the command. I would suggest
> that \follow indicate which notes with the sharp or flat, as
>
> \follow fs cs gs {music}
>
> to avoid language problems as much as possible.
>
> It is possible that a piece may have so many of certain
> accidentals that \follow would be more trouble unless you lied
> about the key. You would probably not use it for a blues in G.
>
> The need is to insert the chromatic signs
> before anything else, such as transposition, is done.
> Kindest regards, Rale


If I understand correctly your proposal is that

\language "english"

m = { ff' f' fs' }

\m
\follow fs \m
\follow ff \m

will be printed different.

In my thinking that's absolute crude.
Though, obviously there are other opinions about that.

Patches are always welcome.


Cheers,
  Harm