Re: Proportional notation not working as expected.

[Wols Lists]

On 15/09/19 01:51, Andrew Bernard wrote:
> Hi Stefano,
> 
> I work extensively with a New Complexity School composer whose work I
> engrave. I disagree with one of his major concepts, which is that the
> bars should be 3.0 cm wide and represent one second of music. He's
> really insistent on this. Personally I don't believe this helps the
> musicians at all, and music is not graph paper as far as I am concerned,
> speaking as a player.
> 
> I have tried for years to make equal, fixed width bars with proportional
> notation in Lilypond. With his music changing time signature sometimes
> every bar, I am utterly unable to achieve what he wants. The requirement
> is simple - fixed width bars of a specified size.
> 
> I have a vague idea that this concept goes completely against the design
> of the lilypond layout engine, and so it may be stupid to even want
> this. But much as I disagree with the musical justification for this,
> this topic does keep coming up on this list from time to time from
> others also.

>From my memories of years ago, yes it does. Lilypond is intended to
produce music that is easy to read.

While "beauty" may seem a subjective concept, there are certain rules in
how we perceive beauty, and beautiful music by its very nature is
usually easy to read.

One of those rules is that ALL LINES SHOULD BE SUBTLY DIFFERENT. That
means, even if you have two lines with exactly the same notes, they
should not render exactly the same. To give a real-world example, my
wife has great difficulty reading books because she can't work out where
lines begin and end. That's why newspapers and others often use columns,
because that makes the end of one line and the beginning of the next
easy to track. Your composer friend is - intentionally or not - making
it very difficult for musicians to read his music because he is making
it very easy for them to get the lines muddled and get lost.

Unfortunately he is falling into the classic manager trap of telling
other people HOW to do their job. As a composer it is his job to tell
the musicians WHAT notes to play. If he insists on telling the musicians
HOW to play them, his music will very rapidly disappear as "unplayable",
unless and until some arranger removes all those silly layout rules.

Cheers,
Wol