Saying hi & question about Klavarskribo

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lettersquash

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Mar 22, 2021, 8:21:20 PM3/22/21
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Hello members, this is my first post here. I'd like to congratulate the NMNP on your excellent website documenting and classifying different notation systems, and on the very interesting research.

I'm returning to reading music for the piano, having had some years of lessons in my teens. I'm now approaching 60. I've always been frustrated that the traditional system is so counter-intuitive, and have often played around with alternatives. When I was still a teenager I "invented" - probably like many others did - a system based on the piano, rather like Klavarskribo, never thinking anybody would change to it. I was surprised to see that there is now a lot of music published in Klavar notation, and there is at least a thriving community in some parts of the world.

I'm far enough on in "learning the dots" to continue with the traditional notation, I'm very interested in Klavar as probably the most serious challenge to it (at least for standard keyboard players, including multi-instrumental MIDI composers). I came here to make contacts and see what could be done. Does anyone here know what happened to the UK website that I see links for? Do you have any idea why Klavar is still little used? What would improve Klavar notation itself or its popularisation?

I'm not sure about other systems, particularly any that replace the staff with something fairly similar-looking, even if the interval spacing is different, but perhaps that's my piano-keyboard bias. I believe that any system where all semitones are given a unique and reliable notation is objectively better than the traditional system, with its sharps, flats, clefs and key signatures, but the inertia of the latter is so great that I imagine it would take more than that to have an impact, and any similarity of a new notation to traditional notation is potentially a drawback, since it introduces confusion to the reader.

I hope I might contribute to the development of (a) better system(s) of notation. My musical theory isn't great, but I have several skills that might be useful. I hope to share some ideas and suggestions. One important one to consider nowadays is how valuable are the Project's preferences around simple inscription - particularly things like being able to write a script with a pen or pencil, without the use of a ruler. We live in times when people don't carry paper and pencil or pen and rarely write anything, we carry phones that draw straight lines according to our programming requirements, and accept all manner of input types, from alphanumeric language to taps, to humming or playing your favourite instrument. Composers use these in preference to paper. They play music back to us. So, if we're serious about rolling out a new system, it needs to be of the moment and the future, and I don't think we should afford ourselves the minimal luxury of requiring that we can scribble a tune with a graphite stick.

Musical Supersystem

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Mar 25, 2021, 9:56:21 AM3/25/21
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Do you have any idea why Klavar is still little used? What would improve Klavar notation itself or its popularisation?

Maybe ' Video killed the radio star '.
Klavar was still the product of mechanical times and a mechanical mindset.
While Mr Pot acheived an incredible lot and put his money where his mouth was I think he was according to his times and not ahead of them as some people have said.
In the klavar documentary he critizises what he calls "the pianola roll notation", which was in any case the one ahead of time, and when its time came at the end of 70' -- begining of 80' it was like a no brainer. The 80' were pivotal times with cable TV, personal computers, MIDI, walls comming down and klavar beginig to freeze in the past.

YY.



I'm not sure about other systems, particularly any that replace the staff with something fairly similar-looking, even if the interval spacing is different, but perhaps that's my piano-keyboard bias. I believe that any system where all semitones are given a unique and reliable notation is objectively better than the traditional system, with its sharps, flats, clefs and key signatures, but the inertia of the latter is so great that I imagine it would take more than that to have an impact, and any similarity of a new notation to traditional notation is potentially a drawback, since it introduces confusion to the reader.

I hope I might contribute to the development of (a) better system(s) of notation. My musical theory isn't great, but I have several skills that might be useful. I hope to share some ideas and suggestions. One important one to consider nowadays is how valuable are the Project's preferences around simple inscription - particularly things like being able to write a script with a pen or pencil, without the use of a ruler. We live in times when people don't carry paper and pencil or pen and rarely write anything, we carry phones that draw straight lines according to our programming requirements, and accept all manner of input types, from alphanumeric language to taps, to humming or playing your favourite instrument. Composers use these in preference to paper. They play music back to us. So, if we're serious about rolling out a new system, it needs to be of the moment and the future, and I don't think we should afford ourselves the minimal luxury of requiring that we can scribble a tune with a graphite stick.

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Musical Supersystem

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Mar 25, 2021, 7:09:25 PM3/25/21
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Let me say it in other words, the competitor of klavar is not the conventional notation but the pianola roll, and it lost fair and square by a mile, no need of an army of piano teachers or academies, no business selling scores, nobody criticizing the conventional notation, just type: piano tutorial on youtube and you will get a lot of pianola roll and probably no Klavar, even of just released hits, you name it.
So let's be honest, Klavar ended up beaten by the competitor the very Pot once criticized.


John Keller

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Mar 25, 2021, 10:05:43 PM3/25/21
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YouTube piano tutorials that show a video of notes cascading down onto piano keys might work for some to learn a piano piece, but requires the learner to memorise as they go. 

Klavar has the same idea of just play what you see, but it is very wide which makes it tiring to read. And if the learner is a bit familiar with Traditional Notation, the interval sizes of distance between notes is nothing like the TN.

If you only wanted to play naturals within one clef, TN would be fine for an average person. The problems with TN involve how the black keys are written as accidentals and key signatures. Also the fact that bass clef and treble clef are different and that legerlines can become tiring to work out.

My own system, Express Stave, solves all the problems. Like Klavar it depicts the black keys directly, just uses one line for each group of 2 and 3, rather than 2 and 3 lines. 

Try this page, “Black Keys Geography”:
I don’t think it needs explanation. But let me know if it does!

Cheers,
John Keller


drtec...@gmail.com

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Mar 26, 2021, 9:26:35 AM3/26/21
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John,

I tried your “Geography” lesson, and it does work fine for the black keys, which accommodates any song from the pentatonic scale,

If you happen to be comfortable in the key of Gb/F#.

 

But for some of your other scores, e.g. Bach Prelude 1, I find it difficult to distinguish the slant notes from the horizontal notes at smaller font size.

 

I have had some success with another approach: I use TN with a color printer to color flats blue and sharps red. I’ve done simplified arrangements of Pachelbel Canon in D, Moonlight Sonata in C#m,  Hallelujah Chorus in D, and Guaraldi Linus and Lucy in Ab, among others. The two-color approach distinguishes Ab from G#, etc., thus allowing true harmonic chord spelling. One could use additional colors for double sharp/flat if needed.

 

I also find it very effective to make a “notation” change that is really not a change in notation at all, but just a layout change:

I break the lines at phrases instead of measure bars.  This exposes the “form” of the piece, exposes parallel passages,

highlights cadences and chord progressions, cues phrasing and tempo/dynamics changes, and assists in memory and interpretation.

 

It does get a bit dicey when chords change on a measure but melodies break within measures.

In principle, that could be accommodated by allowing different parts to split at different counts, but I know of no readily available score editor that would allow it.  It’s hard enough to find a score editor that allows mid-measure breaks, but I’ve found Lilypond accommodates it well.

 

I must admit the standard office paper sizes are not ideal for this format—I’d prefer something larger and more square—but it works for “songs” or beginning lesson pieces.

 

Note that either of my approaches can be combined with just about ANY alternative notation, including ExpressStave and Clairnote,

And they are readily implemented in Lilypond. The colored accidentals in particular helps adapt isomorphic notations to the traditional piano keyboard, for those who do not have a Janko piano.

 

Joe Austin aka Dr Tech Daddy

“Music is Poetry;

Why print it as Prose?”

drtec...@gmail.com

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Mar 26, 2021, 9:52:55 AM3/26/21
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So let me mount my favorite soapbox:

 

If you want to launch a successful alternative notation, create a teaching method using the notation!

John Keller did that with ExpressStave.  I’m not sure Pot actually released a beginner method, although he did release quite a bit of sheet music.

 

As for pianola, I have not yet found a beginner method in this notation, at least not in Synthesia.

Sure, I can get just about any song as a video in “watch me play this song and do the same thing” format.

But that’s not what I call a “method.”

I would like to see a series of graded pieces and exercises accompanied by explanatory information about the *music* that the notation represents, e.g. beat and rhythm and keys and scales and chords and chord progressions and melodic progressions, parallelism and variation, cadences and modulation, musical forms.  And fingering.  In other words, *music*  lessons.

 

I had actually started to covert a standard method to isomorphic notation for Jankó, but discovered that:

  1. The bulk of most conventional methods is devoted to decoding traditional notation,

And is typically sequenced to delay the introduction of “black keys” or accidentals.

  1. For an isomorphic keyboard, you probably want a totally different approach to sequencing keys and melodies,

Because any “five-finger” position involves two rows of keys.

 

Converting any standard method to Pianola should be straightforward,

But promulgating it would doubtless be a violation of copyright, so even someone who was willing to donate their time

Would be unlikely to risk the legal exposure. 

 

So until some publisher is willing to undertake the project, or at least release the copyright,
I don’t see Pianola becoming a viable notation.

 

From: musicn...@googlegroups.com <musicn...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Musical Supersystem
Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2021 7:09 PM
To: musicnotation <musicn...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [MNP] Saying hi & question about Klavarskribo

 

Let me say it in other words, the competitor of klavar is not the conventional notation but the pianola roll, and it lost fair and square by a mile, no need of an army of piano teachers or academies, no business selling scores, nobody criticizing the conventional notation, just type: piano tutorial on youtube and you will get a lot of pianola roll and probably no Klavar, even of just released hits, you name it.

Musical Supersystem

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Mar 26, 2021, 10:09:35 AM3/26/21
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On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 10:05 PM John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:
YouTube piano tutorials that show a video of notes cascading down onto piano keys might work for some to learn a piano piece, but requires the learner to memorise as they go. 

Forcing us to develop skills that make us less dependent on notation seems to me more of a good thing than a bad one, we do not see many musicians on stage reading scores, and when they do, I do not perceive it as something good or superior but the opposite.
 
My own system, Express Stave, solves all the problems. Like Klavar it depicts the black keys directly, just uses one line for each group of 2 and 3, rather than 2 and 3 lines. 

Try this page, “Black Keys Geography”:
I don’t think it needs explanation. But let me know if it does!

I get it, it seems a good idea which is surrounded by 'perhaps' more details than it should, e.g. notes that are expected black are white, same colors have different angles and same angles have different colors, I can see that is related to 6/6; the symmetry of D and G# on the keyboard, black keys are on the line and off the line; the point is that when it all comes together on a cluttered score for someone that just want to play the piano occasionally it might not be attractive.




 

John Keller

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Mar 26, 2021, 1:30:10 PM3/26/21
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Hi Joe, 

Thanks for trying the black key geography lesson. The aim of simply indicating black keys directly is to try to avoid making decisions as to whether they are sharps or flats.

With naturals, it is not necessary to distinguish the ‘bigs' and ‘smalls' (slant and horizontal notes). With the ‘classic' ES font, they are the same shape anyway, just more lightly or heavily hugging the lines.

Did you try Moonlight Sonata (original) in ES? All my adult students have learnt this quite easily and well.

I reject your idea that there is a 'true harmonic spelling’ of chords. That idea is simply based on the ‘rule' of using skipping naturals, thus implying that the naturals are somehow more fundamental than the extras. 

If you take 12et as the pitch set, AHBCIDJEFKGL, then the two chords F minor and E major both have the middle note L. Calling it Ab versus G# is only relevant when the black keys have to use white keys' lines or spaces in TN.

I agree that layout can often help show structural form of pieces, and I am pleased you acknowledge the role of the bar line in showing where harmonic change occurs, often out of sync with melodic phrasing.

Cheers,
John


John Keller

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Mar 26, 2021, 5:49:09 PM3/26/21
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Hi YY,

Solo concert pianist musicians on stage might by tradition play from memory, but you forget the musicians in the pit and orchestras, ensembles and bands and bars who are reading notes or chord charts. Trying to force playing by rote rather than encouraging reading, is like ditching books and libraries!

Express Stave has a deep theory that enables following tonality around the key circle. Its detail need not be explained to the beginner, but it is quite sophisticated, not necessarily by design, but arises due to the simple idea of the symmetry of the whole system.

The scores are much less cluttered than TN with accidentals. An ‘occasional’ piano player would only want simple pieces, whether in TN, ES or Klavar.

Regarding the reverse note colour of ES, imagine a sythesia type video where the black notes cascade down and land on white keys, while the white notes land on the black keys. See my illustration at the bottom of the geography page, or my illustrations in the 24 scales and key signatures file.

Cheers,
John

lettersquash

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Mar 26, 2021, 9:00:31 PM3/26/21
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" Forcing us to develop skills that make us less dependent on notation seems to me more of a good thing than a bad one, we do not see many musicians on stage reading scores, and when they do, I do not perceive it as something good or superior but the opposite. "

If you find it useful, that's great. Everything has upsides and downsides. My problem with "pianola" style apps isn't that they force us to develop a particular skill (remembering how to play a piece, which comes anyway when you learn it from reading music), it's that it is so radically different from what most people understand as a "musical notation system", where one can hold a piece of paper or a book - or even look at a screen with minutes-worth of notes on it - and READ it, gleaning all sorts of insights about that piece and music in general. With pianola apps, you wait there while the notes arrive and try to keep up with them (I assume - or maybe some keep up with your MIDI keyboard or through listening in with a mic). With a written piece of music, you can much more easily analyse it, repeat the same bars or phrases, changing your tempo as you do so, trying different fingering (and often it's useful to write on the paper to make your own notes, like what fingering you prefer).

As a further advancement in "forcing us to develop skills that make us less dependent on notation," you could ditch any visual cues altogether and just listen attentively to a piece and keep trying to reproduce it. It works for some. Mozart remembered the whole of Miserere by Allegri from one hearing, went home and wrote it down. For non-geniuses, some scribbles on paper aren't a bad thing. They don't STOP you learning to play without the score.

lettersquash

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Mar 26, 2021, 9:00:31 PM3/26/21
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Hi John Keller,

"YouTube piano tutorials that show a video of notes cascading down onto piano keys might work for some to learn a piano piece, but requires the learner to memorise as they go."

I agree. I didn't think YY/MNP could be referring to those because they're not really a musical notation system. But after I posted I realised that's probably what they meant. They're more like a Pavlovian training exercise. An improvement in musical notation allows a great deal of simplification compared to the traditional, but cascading notes are going to far, a real "dumbing down" of piano playing.


"Klavar has the same idea of just play what you see, but it is very wide which makes it tiring to read."

I haven't tried reading much Klavar, and nothing with a wide tonal range. Certainly its width is a problem. I've wondered about the old 8ve method, putting some passages in more central octaves but marked differently. Again, an awkward compromise, but all notation systems will involve those. I guess you're thinking about the difficulty of scanning visually to the left and right to read low and high notes.

"And if the learner is a bit familiar with Traditional Notation, the interval sizes of distance between notes is nothing like the TN."

Also true, but not something I consider a serious issue. After a short while, I found I became accustomed to it, and the direct relationship to the piano keys makes it easy to overcome. Actually, I also found any isomorphic staff weird, and it actually is weird if superimposed on the piano keyboard. People often don't notice this and it took me a while. It's easy to think that an isomorphic staff (one based on equal distances between semitones) will be more natural and obvious as we play the notes on the piano, but PHYSICALLY as well as in standard notation, all the white notes are equidistant, with SOME black notes squeezed in between SOME of them. It's not so weird if you just focus on the back half of a keyboard, where they're more evenly spaced!

"If you only wanted to play naturals within one clef, TN would be fine for an average person. The problems with TN involve how the black keys are written as accidentals and key signatures. Also the fact that bass clef and treble clef are different and that legerlines can become tiring to work out."

Absolutely. This, I'm sure, is why so many learners bail somewhere in between Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and intermediate ability. It's a terrible loss of potential talent and human enjoyment.

"My own system, Express Stave, solves all the problems. Like Klavar it depicts the black keys directly, just uses one line for each group of 2 and 3, rather than 2 and 3 lines. "

That is very interesting, and you seem to have put a great deal of effort into developing it and writing educational materials. Well done.

It doesn't depict the black keys directly in the same way as Klavar - using the staff - your note-head colour does that (reversed, which is no doubt great for harpsichordists!). I think it's clear from discussions here and elsewhere that people have all sorts of personal preferences. Some people will look at Klavar and run away because there are too many lines or it's "going down the page". I rather like it, but recognise some of its flaws. I'm less fond of yours, because of the five semitones that have to be depicted in a single space. You deal with that with the head colours and up- or down-slanting head shape, I gather, and I dare say one might get used to it with a good deal of practice. The beauty of Klavar - as Mr. Pot said in the documentary - is that people can learn it in about ten minutes and - I imagine - develop proficiency at a reasonable rate too. The brain has so little work to do in relating dot-line relationships with piano key, which no other novel staff I've seen can match.

But one great advantage of your system is its compactness. However, I'm concerned that the closest intervals I've seen written are whole tones, and these already have to be set side by side. How would one write semitone intervals, particularly a bunch together (admittedly not a common event, but possible)? Another slight down-side for me is that you seem to have retained something akin to the conventional value symbols (time duration of notes) - although I've maybe not read enough - you must have adjusted this for the black/white notes issue (since these are used for quarter and half notes in TN).

Have you had much interest and positive feedback?

"Try this page, “Black Keys Geography”:
I don’t think it needs explanation. But let me know if it does!"

Nicely presented - but I had to find the rest of your uploads to understand how you fitted five semitones into the gaps! http://musicnotation.org/wiki/notation-systems/express-stave-by-john-keller/

Impressive work - don't take my crit too harshly - different strokes for different folks, as the saying goes. I wish my earlier long post didn't get lost - I got the report that it was being moderated, but it's not here and I didn't take a copy. I wrote quite a bit about possible improvements to Klavar I've been playing with.

Many thanks,
John Freestone

lettersquash

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Mar 26, 2021, 9:00:31 PM3/26/21
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Hi YY,

I had not seen that documentary before, so thanks for the link, it's really interesting and I watched part 1 as well. I am fairly new to all this, so I don't know whether Klavar is now in decline or increasing its popularity. My comment about it not being used much is in comparison with traditional notation. I am sure that is because of the intertia that any system gains once it's in general use. The same was true of the British monetary system and our reliance on ancient measures like the yard, foot and inch, until the '70s when there was a programme of decimalisation.

I agree that Klavar was a product of the mechanical age, but I don't see that as affecting its superiority over the traditional notation, which are due to its essential design qualities. I would like to emphasize that we can move on further in the digital age - with any notation system - because a programming approach allows easy personalisation of all sorts of features of a script. The same program can, for example, display Klavar-like notation as Pot devised it, with a vertical staff, black dots on the black notes, white circles on the white, tails indicating the left and right hands, etc., and by changing a few variables, turn it round to read left-to-right with pitch up the page, make all the notes open and without tails, and draw left-hand notes with diamonds and the right with circles. The personalisation options are almost limitless, and these could be printed out to suit the player's preference should a hard copy be required.

The documentary reminded me of another irony, considering the preferred attribute of the Project for notation types that are monochrome - the earliest stave had a red line, to which was added a green one! Medieval monks found it useful to include colour in their notation system, but now we have an odd requirement that a single pencil or pen must do. There is a good reason not to have a fixed use of colour, because people have different colour vision (red and green is the worst choice for me), but again, computing allows us to modify the colour scheme to suit the user, just as some of us will like typing in our word processor programs in Times Roman and others in Arial or Comic Sans.

The world of academic music suffers from this absurd reverence to the archaic methods handed down to us. The New Musical Notation Project is an inspiration - I was searching for that kind of material and found nothing as broad-ranging and organised on the Net - but it still feels like a half-way house with some of its preferences, which don't take advantage of the digital revolution. The future of notation will almost certainly be with apps.

Some of the above changes - all notes open (black-key notes will still show the staff line through them), shaped heads for left and right instead of tails, etc. - are things I played with in a little test program I wrote, but then I realised it's silly trying to "improve" Klavarskribo according merely to my preferences, when these can be options you choose in a Settings dialog. Nobody has to lose anything. Indeed, apps might display music in several completely different scripts as required (as some do already).

I'm not sure about the "pianola" notation, but I think it may have lines drawn from the start of a note through to its end. This is how many piano-roll type programs work, and it's great for composing and transcribing, but it has at least two serious issues as a notation to read from. The first is that as notes are added, they become hard to distinguish from the lines of the stave (indeed, doing this with a Klavar white note is virtually impossible) - the whole navigation system can get overwhelmed by notes' duration lines. The other is that we're not good at judging the strict proportional distances that indicate the passage of time (hence the dotted lines in Klavar or the value system of traditional notation). Thankfully, almost all music involves notes whose value is a simple mathematical ratio, mostly powers of 2 and 3, and we count our way through music to keep time and play the notes when they should be played. I haven't tried Synthesia (obviously less a notation system than a video game), but I imagine it suffers from this problem - it's hard to judge the notes' duration as they charge towards the keyboard (let alone their pitch) when they're just different length lines hanging there in space. When I first saw Klavar, I decided I'd like to keep the staff, but try using traditional note value shapes, because I had less problem with those than the sharps and flats, and I found the timing in Klavar difficult at first. After a while, I realised it's much easier and better than the traditional system.

In case you're wondering about my other adjustments, one reason I tried open heads for all the notes was to allow them to be placed at the same position vertically in chords, even semitones apart (since they overlap better and the separate circles can still be discerned), and I did that because the Klavar method of putting black notes above the tail and white ones below interferes with the judgement of the timing (since black notes now appear to come earlier). This is partly overcome by just relying on the position of the tail, but that takes some conscious effort, and if notes are packed in a bit, a black note might look almost like it belongs with the last set, or somewhere between. Secondly, adding to that problem is the fact that the left and right pointing tails are useless when fingers or hands cross over in a chord, since the tails just join up, leaving it entirely unclear which hand plays which note. The tails also gave a cluttered look to the music, so I thought it would be better to make them different shapes (diamonds and circles work well, as do certain types of triangle).

Tails are often joined between notes, reminiscent of quavers (eigth notes) in trad script, and I'm not au fait with Klavarskribo enough to know if this is just a phrasing thing, or to emphasize that those notes belong to a particular beat (the latter, I think, since there are also curved lines, presumably for phrasing). This feature might suggest that having no tails would be a problem. It might, or perhaps the uncluttering might allow better use of the beat (dotted) lines and clearer recognition of the intra-beat timing of notes.

First of all, I tried something else, making all the notes on the staff the same width by drawing the black lines in grey, the same width as the white notes. This means full circles can be set together without overlap, but it is at quite a lot of cost in width (or height in the other orientation).

Thanks very much for your reply. I'd love to hear more of your views on all this. I don't think there's any reason Klavar needs to be frozen in the past, it just has to move with the times.
JF

lettersquash

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Mar 26, 2021, 9:00:31 PM3/26/21
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I'm not sure what you're referring to, sorry. Are you sure you typed it right, "pianola roll"? A "pianola" is a mechanical device for playing piano music from a punched roll - surely you're not saying Klavarskribo was beaten by that? (Incidentally, my last message seems to have disappeared, although maybe it's me - I can't tell what's what on Google Groups, it's fricken useless).

John Keller

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Mar 27, 2021, 1:07:12 AM3/27/21
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Hey Paul Morris,

In the new description of ES, can the following sentence:
"These notes are distinguished by their notehead color, and in handwritten form no distinction in vertical position is required.” 
be changed to
These notes are simply distinguished by their notehead color.

"Express Stave has an accompanying note naming scheme that retains the traditional names for the naturals  
ABCDEFG, but introduces new letter-names for the other five “extras” (black keys). 

The 2-black-key group is I and J (the two dotted letters of the alphabet) and the 3-black key group is KLH
The staff line for G#/Ab (L) may then be called the "link line", as it ‘links’ each ’naturals alphabet’ ABCDEFG to the next. 
This gives the 12 pitch names as the first 12 letters of the alphabet, A to L, in the following chromatic order:
A – H – B – C – I – D – J – E – F – K – G – L

Note also that H (B flat) is historically the first extra pitch to be added to the naturals; and B and H are reversed in German terminology.

The next paragraph is ok up to :

"See also 6-6 jazz font version introduced February 2009, which is the form used for handwriting. Then delete reference to the Tricolor Version introduced September 2010.

The ES jazz font version is ok, except can the 3 clefs be the same as in the classic version (no hollow notes)?

Cheers,
John

John Keller

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Mar 27, 2021, 2:51:24 PM3/27/21
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Hey John Freestone,

Is this the long post you thought you had lost?
(In case you still didn’t find it)

John Keller




J R Freestone

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Mar 27, 2021, 3:17:06 PM3/27/21
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Hi John Keller,

Yes, it's been a long time in the pipeline. Heck, I'd forgotten how long the post was, too! zzzz

JF

Musical Supersystem

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Mar 27, 2021, 6:14:21 PM3/27/21
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On Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 9:00 PM lettersquash <j.r.fr...@gmail.com> wrote:

I agree. I didn't think YY/MNP could be referring to those because they're not really a musical notation system. But after I posted I realised that's probably what they meant. They're more like a Pavlovian training exercise. An improvement in musical notation allows a great deal of simplification compared to the traditional, but cascading notes are going to far, a real "dumbing down" of piano playing.

Hi JF, 
What we call now piano (pianola) roll notation (PR) is not a solution created out of the criticism of the conventional notation (CN) or intended to reform or replace it as so many others. The same way said PR is not a match to all the roles of the CN, the CN is not a match to the PR role of easily notating and playing back anything accurately, they are complementary notations while each one dominates and is King of its territory.
I agree these moving bands are not an equivalent of the CN but certainly are invading the piano-playing territory and surprisingly competing with the other King, who knew.
Then when a King is expanding its territory on foot with sticks and stones (not significantly refined from original), when having trucks and machine guns (as the other King has) it could be another story. 
On the silent-paper score CN fully dominates (so far) but on the media score I bet on the PR and its new possibilities.

I wonder if  'dumbing down' is derogatory in this case but I have met some teenagers with some piano playing skills, which main or only source has been these videos with falling notes, the trick is that they use the pause, and practice one hand at a time, then every piece adds some skill for the next one.

I have been exploring (though not using scientific methods so far) about the combined volume of activity of Apps, web interfaces and videos and I dare saying that more people are playing piano or keyboards with this type of notation in a month (or much less) than what they have played with Klavar and all alternative notations similars to the CN combined in 90 years, that still may sound as not much but eventually it could be.


YY.

 

Musical Supersystem

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Mar 27, 2021, 8:51:37 PM3/27/21
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On Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 9:00 PM lettersquash <j.r.fr...@gmail.com> wrote:

I agree that Klavar was a product of the mechanical age, but I don't see that as affecting its superiority over the traditional notation, which are due to its essential design qualities. I would like to emphasize that we can move on further in the digital age - with any notation system - because a programming approach allows easy personalisation of all sorts of features of a script. The same program can, for example, display Klavar-like notation as Pot devised it,

In some old computer I should have a program that I downloaded and tested from a Klavarscribo organization, I am not sure if it is this one

I tried importing MIDI files of simple and intermediate piano pieces, the results were disappointing cluttered and useless scores. 
Actually what I mainly meant about 'mechanical' was 'manual' mindset, which is the same mindset of the CN; meaning a music notation that only can be written properly through a manual process as opposed to conversion engine modules of music score writers.
If there is something that I do not want and I do not see a future is another music notation that only can be written properly through a manual process, I already have one and that is enough.


YY.


J R Freestone

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Mar 27, 2021, 9:15:33 PM3/27/21
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Yes, I've tried that program too. I agree the score is cluttered and of poor quality when printed, although I got better results after adjusting some of the settings (reducing the thickness of the joining lines on the stems helps a lot). But this is why Klavarskribo can be improved along some of the lines I've mentioned here. I might get round to writing a program myself, and I hope to design some simple examples in a graphics program soon.
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John Keller

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Mar 29, 2021, 10:17:46 PM3/29/21
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Paul, 

I can make the changes myself if you allow me to. Just let me know how!

Cheers, 
John 

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lettersquash

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Mar 30, 2021, 4:17:23 PM3/30/21
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John Keller,
Could you tell me why Express Stave black and white notes/keys are reversed? It seems an odd decision. I think I would find it easier the other way round, but I'm probably missing some logic behind it. Thanks ¬~

John Keller

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Mar 30, 2021, 8:29:14 PM3/30/21
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Hi Lettersquash,

1: Compare this well know piano piece in TN and ES:

http://musicnotation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Mozart-Sonata-Facile-TN.pdf

(Also Solfeggietto)

2: If you wanted to mark the keys on a keyboard to show a kid which notes to play, how would you do it?
See my solution in 24 Scales and Key Signatures.

3: If I am handwriting music, most of the time in TN I write filled in dot type notes. This makes ES similar.

4: Especially to draw the notes B and F (the only notes that don’t touch lines). They are easier as solid notes.
By the way, these two notes are incorporated into the two clefs (“Bird” clef and “Frog” clef). 
Interestingly, they have the same relationship to their staves as the treble (G-clef) and bass (F-clef) have in TN.
(And the other ES clef, the D-clef, also relates the the alto or C-clef of TN in the same way.)

ES evolved to this version over quite a few years.

You might also wonder why my "key clock" (circle of 5ths) is drawn the other way to conventional.
1: It is so chords flow clockwise.
2: Keys on the left have black keys on the left of the groups of 2 and 3. (e.g. F# is the left of the 3, and C# is the left of the 2)
Vice-versa for flat keys.
3: It allows the minor key signatures to be read off the same circle (A minor with 0 is on the left, J minor with 6# or 6b is on the right).

Hope this answers you satisfactorily!

Cheers, 
John


lettersquash

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Mar 31, 2021, 7:37:05 PM3/31/21
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Hi John, thanks for your reply. I can't say I'm sure your choice was a sound one, but I guess after a while accommodating the reversal of black and white it would become more natural.

"If you wanted to mark the keys on a keyboard to show a kid which notes to play, how would you do it?"

Why would I mark the keys on a keyboard to show a kid which notes to play? What would I mark them with? What would I do when I want them to play other notes? If I understand your point, you suggest that you are bound to use black stickers or something on the white keys and vice versa, or they won't show up, making your choice of reversed note/key colours obvious, but there are other colours that contrast with both.

And there is notation. What I could imagine myself doing is showing a kid which notes to play on the keyboard via a diagram, and on that I would be more likely to put black dots for the black keys and circles for the white - since that is going to be most inuitive for anyone reading it (which is the argument I feel would, for me, trump any others you've given) - perhaps in something like a Klavarskribo arrangment. I can't imagine saying, "Here, look, these black dots, they're the white keys...okay?...and these white circles represent the black keys," because that would introduce an unnecessary source of confusion for the student. I wouldn't want to give them the feeling there's some deep Zen mystery there where everything is going to be topsy-turvy.

John Keller

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Mar 31, 2021, 8:59:47 PM3/31/21
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One of my aims is to help students learn traditional notation as well. So the Express Stave needs to have qualities that carry across to TN.

See this YT video showing how to learn bass clef notes.

As well as bass clef correlation, notice all interval sizes are identical as in TN. 

There is also a correlation with TN key signatures.

I don’t expect to convince you, but yes, students get to think of the naturals and extras as reverse colours quite automatically.

Cheers, 
John


lettersquash

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Apr 1, 2021, 8:01:37 PM4/1/21
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John, thanks for that. Sorry if I came over as a bit agressive in my criticism, and thank you for responding more calmly than you might have. I hope it's alright if I use this space to analyse my response to ES, because I'm trying to work it out, and I'm rarely as confused about something that, on the face of it, should be quite simple. I was (and still am) baffled about the colour swap. I can see that the open notes would need to be a bit bigger to show clearly where they were, but not much - they're already on the page, so it's just a question of how many there are going to be of them! Anyway, time to move on.

The video has me scratching my head again about another feature, the head shapes and positioning of them. I wanted to ask you for a chromatic scale and the video gave me that. There is a nice symmetry to it, and there are features of ES that I really like, but, when I first saw it, the horizontal notes and ones at jaunty angles put me off, and their meaning still eludes me. Why are a C, D and an E jaunty, but an F, G A and B horizontal, I wondered. They're all naturals. And since they're naturals there seems no more essential information about their pitch to be conveyed than to choose a symbol and put it in one of seven places. The art of communication is surely to convey information without unnecessary distinction between things, without flourishes that don't add essential meaning, and your system adds a flourish. One set lies in one region of the octave and the other in a complementary range, of course, so I can only imagine that you decided they would be more recognisable if they were grouped by 'slantiness'...but you may again have some other logic in mind that I'm not aware of. I haven't seen any specific explanation in the few bits I've read, nor is it in the video as far as I'm aware. ...But my later analysis here sheds light on it, perhaps...

Watching the video, I then puzzled even further about the way the "extras", as you call them - the black keys - are shaped. Again, I can discern a nice symmetry, which complements the grouping of the naturals in that the C# and D#, in between slanty naturals, are flatter, and F#, G# and A#, between flat-shaped naturals, are slanted, but all this does is make my brain again have to filter out the signal from the noise.

You describe how an Eb is in the E position, but flatter, which could indicate a simple rule - (even if some are chosen to be sharps and others flats, perhaps) - but then I look at other "extras" and they have various combinations of slantiness and position. A Db is not a flatter note on the D line, it's a flatter note in the C position, and to consider it a C# would be odd because the C is pointy and the C# a "flatter" note, so the flat=horizontal rule doesn't apply, nor anything I can easily discern as a rule about placement of the extras. There is one, of course; it's just not simple.

After staring at it for an embarrassing amount of time, I realise the scheme superimposes alternating flat and slanted heads on the given pattern of the C major pentatonic scale, and the result is what gives the apparent arbitrary grouping of different shaped naturals (and extras). I then realise the slanty O is a great way to show that a note is between the one above and the one below, and, since they alternate, the flat heads also sit between their slanting partners, so there's a solid logic to it, I have to admit.

The problem is that you yourself described the Eb as at the SAME position as the E, not in between it and the D, and the notation seems designed on the idea that there are three positions a note can occupy between the lines (so four in total with the ones on lines). Looking at the video, it's clear the centres of the heads are in six positions per line division, five in between the lines. The slanty ones bridge two positions a bit (or completely - it will depend on the font, I suppose).

I keep coming back to my first principle of improving notation, which is to give every semitone a place, instead of TN's exceptionalism on the C-major scale, and the slanty-straight thing kind of does it, by the slanty notes sharing vertical space with the others, but I'm still finding it awkward. The logical, evenly spaced staff lines ought to make note recognition easier than I find it. I find it hard because I'm constantly being bambloozled by the almost non-meaning of a slanty note (it doesn't mean "sharp" and it doesn't mean "flat" and it doesn't mean "natural", it means "I'm here on this sixth division of a half octave, learn me". I accept that it may be quicker to learn than TN.

I also accept that my first favourite, Klavarskribo, has some major issues, despite its near-zero learning requirement (at least for note recognition). I'm trying to improve on it, and your system has provided some inspiration in that regard.

I realise there's a wide range of preferences in designs for alternative notation, so I accept ours are just different (and I'm sure you're a more accomplished musician and teacher). Certainly, the intention to make ES a bridge towards TN (or complement it) will put serious constraints on a notation system. I suppose there are two fairly distinct intentions of an alternative, to replace TN as far as possible, or to help negotiate it better. I'm drawn more to the improve-and-replace end of things, which allows a freer rein. They are at odds to some extent, because the replacers are hampered by the prevalence of TN, and the complementers are turning out more TN users (even if they're bi-lingual or had some intermediate language on the way to TN). Of course, we're not really at odds. TN is indestructible and monumentally tedious to learn, like Egyptian hierogliphics, or English.

Many thanks
¬~

John Keller

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Apr 1, 2021, 9:29:29 PM4/1/21
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Hi Lettersquash,

I am happy you have put so much time and consideration into my system. Certainly no offence is taken.

In that video on learning the bass clef, I shouldn’t have said that E flat is a flatter version in the same space as E. It is just as much a depiction of D#. 

The "jaunty” versus horizontal shapes alternate in the chromatic scale.
In other words they code for the two Whole Tone Scales. 
This is useful for say, constructing a major scale starting on any note - 3 notes from one WTS followed by 4 of the other.

The black key groups (i.e. extras) of 2 and 3 can also be called the small and big groups.
As such, having small and big notes helps in identification. 

Also within the naturals, there are two distinct areas, the CDE section and the FGAB section. If you look at the keyboard it even appears that CDE are wider and FGAB are narrower. This is because 5 keys (CIDJE) get 3/7 of the octave distance while the 7 keys (FKGLAHB) get 4/7 of the octave. (Do the math!) So again I can divide the naturals into the bigs and smalls.

When handwriting, the notes that cross a line are bigs so you can more easily draw them as slanted note (like handwriting in TN). The 2 notes which must not touch either line (B and F) are safer as horizontal, non sloping. (Imagine if they had to be slanting yet not touch either line!)  All these design features were not intentional, but come about because of the initial idea of making the whole system have the D - L symmetry of the keyboard, as opposed the the artificial ‘C-symmetry’ of TN.

After a while I don’t think your brain with be so concerned with shape differences. With both fonts, I have tweaked the individual glyphs so that now I don’t ever get that feeling of a note that stands out too much or too little.

I have updated my file of 24 scales and key signatures to include a graphic page at both ends.

Also you might get information from this file:

Cheers,
John Keller

John Keller

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Apr 2, 2021, 8:40:47 PM4/2/21
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I came across this YouTube channel by searching alternative music notation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hza5c7easRI
I think it complies with all the criteria.
I wonder why it isn’t included on our site.

Cheers,
John


Musical Supersystem

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Apr 3, 2021, 8:30:48 PM4/3/21
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It seems the world is not as small as we usually think it is these days.
The notation is fine-tune to make playing the piano easier and I think it achieves that objective.
But it also seems that he is not aware that his notation is probably more "Guidonian" than the conventional one, because what is attributed to Guido the staff had also four lines and no accidentals like his.
He says that the notations on Reed's book have not succeeded because none of them are superior to the Guidonian, his is the only one that is superior, blaming Guido for putting some sharps and flats and suggesting that notating all twelve notes in about the same space as TN was his discovery despite of having the Reed's book on his hand, who knew.

But anyway thanks for sharing your discoveries.
YY.


lettersquash

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Apr 4, 2021, 7:36:58 AM4/4/21
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Yes, "who knew"? As far as I can remember, the criteria don't include anything about the sanity of the author, so knock yourselves out. I don't mean any disrespect, it's just sad when people get brainwashed by total BS. https://www.thirdeaglemedia.com/ (Don't forget to pray silently so the evil one doesn't hear.)

Mark Gould

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Apr 4, 2021, 11:18:13 AM4/4/21
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Hi All,

One thing I have noticed is that originators of notation reforms are often quite protective of their creations, and one thing that I hope we all share here is the sense that if notation is to be 'reformed' for whatever purpose, it's done objectively.

Mark

On 4 Apr 2021, at 12:37, lettersquash <j.r.fr...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes, "who knew"? As far as I can remember, the criteria don't include anything about the sanity of the author, so knock yourselves out. I don't mean any disrespect, it's just sad when people get brainwashed by total BS. https://www.thirdeaglemedia.com/ (Don't forget to pray silently so the evil one doesn't hear.)
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lettersquash

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Apr 4, 2021, 2:05:18 PM4/4/21
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Hi John,

"I am happy you have put so much time and consideration into my system. Certainly no offence is taken."

I'm relieved to hear it. I have to admit Express Stave is growing on me rapidly. I might yet become a convert - certainly I don't know of any better system, nor can I devise one despite spending a fair amount of time trying!

I was quite surprised, and somewhat irritated that my earlier intuition about it was off. That was probably influenced quite a lot by fixating on the brilliant simplicity of Klavar's use of black and white dots (which I still think is brilliant), but the more I study ES, the more your replies make sense, and I'm beginning to tune in to the reading better. Another thing that threw me is the compressed nature of the stave. Klavar is of course a lot wider, and I'd been working with something more in the region of major thirds, and emphasizing the F# and G#, with a D after I saw your system, so it took a while to orient myself. It is, of course, an advantage if a score can be compact and yet easily readable.

As you say, black notes do fit better. They allow even a tiny little note above or below a line to be unmistakable, as well as allowing the Ds and Fs to sit with empty space around them.


"In that video on learning the bass clef, I shouldn’t have said that E flat is a flatter version in the same space as E. It is just as much a depiction of D#."

Fair enough, and once I get my head around the black-white reversal, there's little confusion possible with a D#/Eb - it's as near as you can get to the D line without being on it, and open.

'The "jaunty” versus horizontal shapes alternate in the chromatic scale.
In other words they code for the two Whole Tone Scales. 
This is useful for say, constructing a major scale starting on any note - 3 notes from one WTS followed by 4 of the other.'

I'm less sure about the value of this, but that's probably just because my approach to music is not very theory-based. I don't really ever have to "construct" a major scale, and in most music we rarely play much more than a little bit of a scale before stepping out of it into something else. But I know many musicians think much more mathematically about it than I do. And what I first noticed, that in the equidistant lines of the staves, the slanty C, D and E help navigation, has stuck with me, meaning I'm unlikely to mix up an E and an A once that penny drops. The point about the TN bass staff encompassing A-G was actually a revelation to me - one of those "have I never noticed that before?" moments - and will probably make my reading of TN easier, but it also fixes the point of your choice of L (link, G#/Ab, for those who don't know) and reinforces the way I'm starting to navigate the ES.

"Also within the naturals, there are two distinct areas, the CDE section and the FGAB section. If you look at the keyboard it even appears that CDE are wider and FGAB are narrower. This is because 5 keys (CIDJE) get 3/7 of the octave distance while the 7 keys (FKGLAHB) get 4/7 of the octave. (Do the math!) So again I can divide the naturals into the bigs and smalls."

Not that it matters really, but I'm less convinced about this maths - you can divide the keys up in all sorts of other ways and do different calculations about how much of the octave they consume. For one thing, CIDJE might well take up 3/7 of the octave and FKGLAHB the other 4/7, but you ought to compensate for the fact that the latter covers 7/12 of the semitones and the former only 5/12!  But - I guess you've noticed, but many haven't - the piano keyboard is a curious beast, consisting of the 7 equal-size white keys at the front and no black keys, yet all 12 semitones are equally spaced along the back half! Then, most people woul draw the keyboard with the black keys centred between their white neighbours, when in fact they're spread out and only the L is centred.

"When handwriting, the notes that cross a line are bigs so you can more easily draw them as slanted note (like handwriting in TN)."

Yes, I see that.

"I have updated my file of 24 scales and key signatures to include a graphic page at both ends.

This will no doubt be useful to some, but, as I say, I'm not hot on the theory side of things. To some extent, key signatures are a feature of TN. Most music will still be "in" a key, or modulate between some identifiable keys, but the "signature" is to accommodate the more frequent sharps or flats of a scale on the staff that doesn't naturally have a place for it.

ATB,
¬~

Musical Supersystem

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Apr 4, 2021, 9:13:45 PM4/4/21
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But we should make an effort and focus on the message and not on the messenger.


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John Keller

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Apr 5, 2021, 5:34:13 AM4/5/21
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Yes I agree. I am not a bible prophesy follower in any way, and am probably guilty of thinking anyone who into this is somewhat crazy. However, looking at Mr Tapley’s notation system, it seems well designed and it also shares some properties with my own system Express Stave (bass clef and keyboard symmetry, 7-5 coding, some notes which slightly sink into the lines as opposed to being straight up lines or spaces). It has been around for a while and had journal articles. Im just surprised he hasn’t submitted it to out website, or we have not heard of it before.

Cheers,
John Keller
Express Stave

Waller Dominique

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Apr 5, 2021, 7:34:43 AM4/5/21
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Hi John,

Surely, Tapley's notation ressembles yours in an astonishing way.

Besides, while watching his video, I was redirected towards another interesting one : 'A different way to visualise rhythm'

Many inventor have worked on the idea of the musical clock, but always for the harmonic aspect.

This time, it helps describing rhythms by beats in the measure, and it's very effective. Check this: https://youtu.be/2UphAzryVpY

Cheers !

 

envoyé : 5 avril 2021 à 11:20
de : John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au>
à : "musicn...@googlegroups.com" <musicn...@googlegroups.com>
objet : Re: [MNP] Gabriel Music Notation by William Tapley

John Keller

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Apr 5, 2021, 8:56:13 AM4/5/21
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Hi Lettersquash,

Firstly, can I ask what is your name, or in other words, how do you like to be addressed? (Im confused by your email j.r.freestone, and your latest sign off ATB.)

I am of course delighted you are warming towards ES.

Whether various properties of ES seem of value will depend on whether you are familiar with TN and its theory. 
For example in TN theory, you construct a major scale by whole tones and semitones as TTSTTTS, with the added rule that you must use 7 consecutive letter names. The ES whole tone scales method of 3 + 4, is simpler, quicker, and immediately reveals the key signature when you do it.
 
You are not the first to have never noticed the A-G symmetry of the keyboard and the bass clef. 
Im glad it might make learning bass easier for you.

My point about the maths of the keyboard design results in the fact that the back of the keys are not in fact exactly equidistant. 
The error is small enough to ignore if you want to.

Take the white key front width to be 1 unit. Then the width of CIDJE section is 3 units, so each key at the back is 3/5.
The width of the FKGLAHB section is 4, so each of these keys is 4/7. Converting these fractions to the common denominator of 35, the width at the back, of keys C D E is 21/35, while the width at the back of F G A B is 20/35. If you look at the keys carefully, you can see this difference.

Whereas the ES design does have equal semitone rises, so it accurately depicts the equal tempered pitch.
You might like to look at page 5 of this file:

It annoys me a lot to see keyboard drawings with all the black keys centred on the white key cracks!

Cheers,
john

lettersquash

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Apr 5, 2021, 3:24:45 PM4/5/21
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Hi John, I'm John Freestone. I started using "lettersquash" about 12 years ago when I set up my blog. I regretted it for a long time, but I've found things to like about it since, and I sometimes sign off "¬~" which looks a bit like "LS" mirrored and on its side. Saying that, I realise how crazy I sound! "ATB" is "all the best".

"My point about the maths of the keyboard design results in the fact that the back of the keys are not in fact exactly equidistant.

The error is small enough to ignore if you want to."

Yes, I had to measure, and I think you're right. The keyboard is even weirder than I thought. Although I realised the 5 were proportionally less compact than the 7, I did believe all the semitones had the same size at the back. I measured, and even that's not so - on my piano, C-E is 7 cm. and F-B is 9.5, so they're about 1.4 cm and 1.357 cm. respectively. One of these days I'll win an argument against you!

The difference of 21/35 versus 20/35, however is 21/20, or 5% (or 3% as measured on my keyboard). Most people will never see that, so it's really neither a big difference nor a significant one. Not only that, since the FGAB section is physically bigger than the CDE section, it's confusing to call the latter the big section and the former the small. I think there are perfectly legitimate - in fact, excellent - reasons for choosing the head shapes you have without that.

I think the best explanation is that if you've got a note in the bottom position of the space and another in the middle position, and they're a tone apart, a good way to indicate the semitone between (given limited space) is a note head tipped over to span bottom and middle, since if we put another horizontal note there we'd find it very difficult to judge between them and the margin of error would be much greater. In addition, of course, two different heads alternating give the whole tone scales.

Cheers!
John F

John Keller

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Apr 5, 2021, 7:03:51 PM4/5/21
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Hi John F,

Yes your final paragraph is the best argument for alternating big and small notes in the chromatic scale.

One more point about the engineering of the keyboard layout is that in fact the black keys are all the same width.
This means the discrepancy between the white key widths at the back between C D E and FGAB is greater than the calculation of just comparing 3/5 and 4/7. The result is you can see and feel these different widths. 
Look at the ‘pairs' BC and EF at the back. Also, play D between the black keys compared with G or A.

Cheers,
John


lettersquash

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Apr 5, 2021, 8:13:44 PM4/5/21
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Hello Dominique Waller, John Keller and all,

As it was mentioned how similar "Gabriel" notation was to Express Stave (ES), I started looking at them more and decided to write a comparison and some of my feelings about their merits. I'm relatively new to both, and maybe John Keller will correct anything I get wrong about ES, or add comments of his own.

I will also echo the sentiment that I try to keep my views about William Tapley's religion entirely separate from my view of his notation system.

A good intro to each might be this http://musicnotation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Express-Stave-Guide--reverseES-1.pdf for ES (particuarly, see the chromatic scale a short way down the page) and the chromatic scale of Gabriel in his video about it (this links to the relevant point) https://youtu.be/Hza5c7easRI?t=910

They are both chromatic, of course, and they both have "repeating octaves", so the notes in any octave are on the same portion of the staff, represented by the same note sign.

They both (as far as I can tell) make minimal changes to the signs used for note value (ES uses a line opposite the note's tail for a minim, since its open-circle shape is already in use for crotchet notation - I'm not sure what Gabriel does). This is in contrast to something like Klavarskribo, for example, which uses proportional distance through the measure to mark note starts and endings.

Gabriel uses two different head symbols, an open round one for the 'naturals' (white keys) and a diamond-shaped filled one for the black keys. This is something of a redundancy - i.e. there are no open diamonds or closed round notes - but it provides a good emphatic difference between the two. One of my slight disappointments about ES was that it reverses the black and white keys to white and black notes, so Gabriel is more pleasing in that it maintains the direct relationship (with a nod to keyboardists with reversed key colours, as many harpsichords have).

ES uses four different head symbols. There are "small" and "large" notes (a horizontally-oriented ellipse and a larger one at an angle), in combination with being open or filled. The open notes represent the black keys and the filled ones the white keys, so this reverses the usual keyboard colours. The large and small heads simply alternate, which provides several advantages, including that each set describes a whole tone scale.

Both staves consist of just two lines (and the spaces between) for each octave, but ES uses D and G#, which it refers to as 'L' (so one white key and one black one), where Gabriel uses F and B (both white). These are the same interval apart (three whole tones), just starting exactly intermediate to each other (three semitones apart).

Gabriel does not indicate the whole tone scales, and emphasizes instead the 5-7 layout of the keyboard, and thus is more C-major-centric. In moving away from the C-major fixation of traditional notation there is always going to be that tension: on the one hand, it would be nice if all semitones could be given equal emphasis; on the other, the keyboard itself is C-major centric. It has black and white keys, and they are largely how we navigate it. ES retains this by colouring the notes, but its alternating shapes give more direct information about intervals, more consistent chord shapes and so easier recognition of scales. Merely showing the black keys (as Gabriel does) means recognition of a major scale, for example, requires that you are familiar with its accidentals already (one of the sticking points of traditional notation with its key signatures). In ES, if you see the pattern of tones and semitones TTSTTTS in sequential notes, irrespective of colour, it's a major scale. In Gabriel, you can only do that by knowing your scales already or judging the semitone distances (which isn't a trivial thing when there are five in the space between one line and the next).

One thing that is strange in Gabriel notation is that it has unequal spaces between the lines, despite the fact that both represent the same number of semitones. Each staff (the treble and the bass) has four lines, giving an octave and a half, but the middle space (between the B and the F lines) is wider than the top and bottom spaces from F to B. I can't see any reason for this other than perhaps to help visually separate them, seeing the pattern of them more easily, but, given that it is a chromatic system and prides itself on octave similarity, this distortion of the pitch axis is a distinct flaw, to my mind. There are different numbers of black and white keys in the spaces, but this doesn't seem to explain it, as they're about the same size. Interestingly, the wide one encompasses C, C#, D, D# and E, which John Keller informs me is proportionally and physically very slightly wider on the keyboard, but this too wouldn't be reason to make the lines so much further apart.

The arrangement of F and B lines separates the keyboard into two quite different sections, one with the three black keys, the other the two. In contrast, Express Stave's use of lines at D (between the two black keys) and L (G#, the middle black key of the three), results in a mirror symmetry in the portions between the lines (i.e. going up from D, or L, gives the same pattern of black and white notes as it does if you go down). This mirror symmetry is true of the notes' colours (obviously), but also their shape.

I haven't practised reading either notation much (a bit with ES, almost none with Gabriel), and it would only be fair to try both a bit more, but I feel that Gabriel suffers in note recognition from the fact that the diamond, although different from the ellipse head, is the same height. This means that in order to differentiate five different positions in the staff's spaces the notes have to be very accurately placed, and the space probably needs to be wider. Three of those notes have empty space either side, and it's down to how much of it there is. With practice, however, familiarity with the patterns of black notes in each section will ameliorate this.

ES, in contrast, does something clever. Here's the problem (with such wide intervals between staff lines): it's easy to distinguish three positions in a space - touching the line below with space above, touching the line above with space below, and in the middle with space above and below. It's the intermediates that case the problem. Instead of trying to fit two more intermediate ones in - slightly raised from the middle and slightly lower - as per Gabriel, ES has recourse to its two different shapes, the small, horizontal ellipses and the larger, slanted ones. Both touch the line below or above it, but the small ones are clearly closer, taking up about a third of the space. The larger, slanted ones take up about 2/3 of the space, spanning from the line to where the middle note would go, so they actually have their centre where you'd expect, in those intermediate positions between the top and middle or middle and bottom, but their shape makes it clear they're the intermediate ones. In addition, at those positions next to a line, one of the two (small/large) is always a white key, the other a black. This is because the places on the keyboard where two white keys occur together, BC and EF both include a middle-of-the-space position note: these are B and F (the notes Gabriel uses as its lines).

This difference allows ES to be more compact, since indicating five positions in a space is harder in Gabriel notation.

I am still not 100% comfortable with the reversed colours in ES, but I think it makes sense. The solid notes are going to be easier to hand write and also take up less space than open notes, so it helps if they're used for the majority of notes written, which is going to be the white keys. First of all, there are 7 white keys to 5 black ones, so without any bias from the keys that pieces are written in, there are likely to be more white keys to notate. Then, given that on the whole music tends to be written in keys with fewer sharps or flats, I suppose the white key predominance will be emphasized. Yet I wish it could be white=white, black=black. I'm assured it will become natural, but at the moment I have to keep reminding myself. Compared to the frustrations of NT with its key signatures, accidentals and incoherent clefs, it's a minor inconvenience.

Another thing is that the Gabriel double staff, with treble above and bass below, has a disproportionately large gap between the two, just as traditional notation has, so leger lines can accommodate notes in either direction into the gap. ES has a proportional staff ranging through three complete octaves (i.e., before any stray notes above or below - there are four L lines!). The middle D-line isn't drawn except as a leger line when needed. I'm not competent enough in music to know what drawbacks this "grand staff" design might have (the extensive space between is where some of the expression marks go, or lyrics of a song), but it has obvious advantages, especially given the octave similarity.

The two Gabriel staves are quite different in that they have four lines, so covering an octave and a half each (the double-staff can be seen at about 10 minutes in the video). The second octave of the bass stave is completed only at the first line of the treble stave, which then has its octave and a half, so the full span is 2 1/2 octaves between the lines rather than 3 for ES. If one thinks of ES has having a treble and bass stave, they are only an octave each, so less than Gabriel's 1 1/2, but it has a middle stave between the two of a full octave. Given that Gabriel is already much higher on the page (about 1 1/2 times) that makes ES significantly more compact.

On consideration, there seems little competition. The difficulty of note recognition in Gabriel's spaces with three positions not touching a line is a big downside. Looking again at the chromatic scale, the smaller space from F up to B is far too small. The F is actually drawn slightly low on the line and the B a bit high, with the diamonds almost on the lines. In the bigger space, C to E have a bit more room, but if they weren't in a chromatic series they'd still be hard to judge, and just...why the disproportionate space for the same number of notes? The more I look at ES, the more elegant and easy-to-read (and write) it seems.

JF ¬~

lettersquash

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Apr 5, 2021, 8:30:22 PM4/5/21
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Correction - Gabriel has 3 1/2 octaves in its two staves, not 2 1/2 - so more than ES's 3 (but it is a lot taller).

John Keller

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Apr 6, 2021, 1:43:44 AM4/6/21
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One interesting point about the Gabriel notation is that the notes Bb, B, F and F# intersect the staff lines at the one third points of the notes rather than the midpoints as in traditional. So the staff lines are really the ‘cracks’ between the keys. I am surprised that Mr Tapley made a pdf with 96 pages of music transcriptions back in 1987.

Cheers,
John


John Keller

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Apr 6, 2021, 2:01:13 AM4/6/21
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I updated my Express Stave Guide, so there is a new link:

John


On 6 Apr 2021, at 10:30 am, lettersquash <j.r.fr...@gmail.com> wrote:

John Keller

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Apr 6, 2021, 2:36:23 AM4/6/21
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Hey Lettersquash, 

I see you commented on Tapley’s Youtube video on Gabriel notation 3 months ago! One suggestion, write shorter paragraphs! Use the the shift-return to make new lines when return is for posting the comment. Otherwise people tend to ’TLDR’.

John K


Mark Gould

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Apr 6, 2021, 4:06:42 AM4/6/21
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One thing I noticed that seemed an interesting innovation was to put tied notes in 'grey'. 

It must have taken a good bit of effort to copy up all that music, and if I am not mistaken the diamond notes look like strokes of a wide calligraphy nib. 

Mark

On 6 Apr 2021, at 06:43, John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:

One interesting point about the Gabriel notation is that the notes Bb, B, F and F# intersect the staff lines at the one third points of the notes rather than the midpoints as in traditional. So the staff lines are really the ‘cracks’ between the keys. I am surprised that Mr Tapley made a pdf with 96 pages of music transcriptions back in 1987.

lettersquash

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Apr 6, 2021, 7:24:39 AM4/6/21
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Hi John K,
" One interesting point about the Gabriel notation is that the notes Bb, B, F and F# intersect the staff lines at the one third points of the notes rather than the midpoints as in traditional. So the staff lines are really the ‘cracks’ between the keys. I am surprised that Mr Tapley made a pdf with 96 pages of music transcriptions back in 1987. "

Good find. Oh, I just thought he'd been a bit inaccurate placing the notes! That's an interesting solution, and of course explains why the middle section is bigger, if what I thought was the F line is actually the 'crack' between F and F#, and the B line is actually between B and Bb.

However, it all seems a bit messy. I also thought he'd been inaccurate with his dotted lines in the image linking the chromatic scale to the piano keys (from his book in the link you've just provided), but he says in the intro, "Since successive notes in the chromatic scale are separated by one third rather than one half note intervals, each staff line intersects two notes, one black and one white." With some calculation, I can see what he's on about, I think, although the sentence doesn't actually make literal sense. There are 12 semitones in the octave, so if each represented "one third note", rising through 12 would give us 8 "notes", but this seems wrong to me. It seems to indicate the common misconception that there are 8 notes in the badly-named octave, when there are seven keys at the front due to the pentatonic nonsense, but it's actually exactly, precisely 6 whole tones. Hence "successive notes in the chromatic scale are separated by" (to use his lingo) "one half note" - that's why we call them semitones!

This psychotic way of dividing up the keyboard kind of explains why he's got dotted lines from the note heads to all sorts of sub-divisions of the keys (I thought they were just pointers), and I really think this is a very bad way to do it (although the result is perhaps a little more readable than the theory suggests). My interpretation of it all as just being a bit sloppy is reinforced by the fact that he's not shown the black keys where they actually are (as we talked about earlier) but set them in the middle of the 'cracks'. If he's going to base his stave on some microtonal measurement along the keys, he'd do better to draw the damn thing right!

But yes, he's put some time in to transcribing music.

"I see you commented on Tapley’s Youtube video on Gabriel notation 3 months ago!"

Yes. I didn't pay it too much attention and got sidetracked criticising his arrogant assertion that it is objectively the best notation system, because he's tried "both" and found his easier! Then, when I saw his site was full of stuff about Q-Anon and Bible prophecies, I moved on.

"One suggestion, write shorter paragraphs! Use the the shift-return to make new lines when return is for posting the comment. Otherwise people tend to ’TLDR’."

How did you guess all my middle initials? Hahahahahaha!

Musical Supersystem

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Apr 6, 2021, 8:35:00 AM4/6/21
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When we thought all the criticism about the traditional music notation had been said, there is more...

YY

drtec...@gmail.com

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Apr 6, 2021, 2:48:27 PM4/6/21
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Let me comment on ExpressStave note position.

For purposes of computer implementation of ExpressStave, I find it convenient to consider the space between lines divided into thirds.  Thus the octave consists of 12 equally spaced positions, six “ribbons” (1/3 spaces) and six “boundaries” between the ribbons, two of which are visible lines and four of which are “invisible”. 

A flat notehead would be centered within a ribbon and would occupy one ribbon height, or 1/3 space height. 
A slant notehead would be centered on a “boundary”, either a visible line or one of the two virtual lines between two ribbons, and it would occupy 2 ribbon spaces in height,

so that the two slant notes in a space would each touch a line and overlap each other in the middle ribbon, while the line notes would occupy the ribbon on either side of the line.

By my interpretation, then, E actually would occupy the same *space* as both J/D#/Eb and F, but would be located (centered) at a distinct *position* between them.

 

John, perhaps you would interpret the height of a slant note as closer to half a space than 2/3, but he 2/3 interpretation gives mathematical equality to the distance between note centers,

Which would be lost with ½ space notes actually touching lines.

 

The advantage of equally-spaced positions for a score editor is that the editor can then accommodate a variety of isomorphic notations with a simple (linear) note number to position calculation.

 

From: musicn...@googlegroups.com <musicn...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of lettersquash
Sent: Thursday, April 1, 2021 8:02 PM
To: The Music Notation Project | Forum <musicn...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [MNP] Express Stave Pianoforte Notation

 

…excerpt…

You describe how an Eb is in the E position, but flatter, which could indicate a simple rule - (even if some are chosen to be sharps and others flats, perhaps) - but then I look at other "extras" and they have various combinations of slantiness and position. A Db is not a flatter note on the D line, it's a flatter note in the C position, and to consider it a C# would be odd because the C is pointy and the C# a "flatter" note, so the flat=horizontal rule doesn't apply, nor anything I can easily discern as a rule about placement of the extras. There is one, of course; it's just not simple.

 

After staring at it for an embarrassing amount of time, I realise the scheme superimposes alternating flat and slanted heads on the given pattern of the C major pentatonic scale, and the result is what gives the apparent arbitrary grouping of different shaped naturals (and extras). I then realise the slanty O is a great way to show that a note is between the one above and the one below, and, since they alternate, the flat heads also sit between their slanting partners, so there's a solid logic to it, I have to admit.

 

The problem is that you yourself described the Eb as at the SAME position as the E, not in between it and the D, and the notation seems designed on the idea that there are three positions a note can occupy between the lines (so four in total with the ones on lines). Looking at the video, it's clear the centres of the heads are in six positions per line division, five in between the lines. The slanty ones bridge two positions a bit (or completely - it will depend on the font, I suppose).

 

I keep coming back to my first principle of improving notation, which is to give every semitone a place, instead of TN's exceptionalism on the C-major scale, and the slanty-straight thing kind of does it, by the slanty notes sharing vertical space with the others, but I'm still finding it awkward. The logical, evenly spaced staff lines ought to make note recognition easier than I find it. I find it hard because I'm constantly being bambloozled by the almost non-meaning of a slanty note (it doesn't mean "sharp" and it doesn't mean "flat" and it doesn't mean "natural", it means "I'm here on this sixth division of a half octave, learn me". I accept that it may be quicker to learn than TN.

 

drtec...@gmail.com

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Apr 6, 2021, 2:53:43 PM4/6/21
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John, from your new guide, it appears that my interpretation of ExpressStave is correct,
with noteheads centered at 12 equally-spaced positions within the octave ,

And slant notes occupying twice the vertical space as flat notes.

 

Joe Austin aka DrTechDaddy

drtec...@gmail.com

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Apr 6, 2021, 3:16:33 PM4/6/21
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John, Thanks for posting Tapley’s Gabriel collection—quite impressive.

 

Joe Austin

John Keller

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Apr 6, 2021, 6:59:14 PM4/6/21
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Mr Tapley has answered my comment on his YouTube video:

"Thanks for the link. How do I submit my notation system to the Music Notation Project? When I first developed Gabriel Notation I became a member of Tom Reed's group and subscribed to his "Musical Six-Six Newsletter. We corresponded regularly and I also wrote to other members. After about ten years my interests shifted and I became discouraged that the music industry was so invested in traditional notation that it would never adopt another notation no matter how "new and improved". My interest has been revived however since I realized that computer technology would make transcribing music into a new system a piece of cake. Not like the intense labor I expended writing my book, "All Keys Are Easy”!”

Should our website include his notation?

John



On 7 Apr 2021, at 5:16 am, drtec...@gmail.com wrote:

John, Thanks for posting Tapley’s Gabriel collection—quite impressive.
 
Joe Austin
 
From: musicn...@googlegroups.com <musicn...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Mark Gould
Sent: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 4:07 AM
To: musicn...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [MNP] Gabriel Music Notation by William Tapley
 
One thing I noticed that seemed an interesting innovation was to put tied notes in 'grey'. 
 
It must have taken a good bit of effort to copy up all that music, and if I am not mistaken the diamond notes look like strokes of a wide calligraphy nib. 
 
Mark


On 6 Apr 2021, at 06:43, John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:

One interesting point about the Gabriel notation is that the notes Bb, B, F and F# intersect the staff lines at the one third points of the notes rather than the midpoints as in traditional. So the staff lines are really the ‘cracks’ between the keys. I am surprised that Mr Tapley made a pdf with 96 pages of music transcriptions back in 1987.
 
Cheers,
John
 
On 6 Apr 2021, at 10:30 am, lettersquash <j.r.fr...@gmail.com> wrote:


Correction - Gabriel has 3 1/2 octaves in its two staves, not 2 1/2 - so more than ES's 3 (but it is a lot taller).

On Tuesday, 6 April 2021 at 01:13:44 UTC+1 lettersquash wrote:
Hello Dominique Waller, John Keller and all,
 
As it was mentioned how similar "Gabriel" notation was to Express Stave (ES), I started looking at them more and decided to write a comparison and some of my feelings about their merits. I'm relatively new to both, and maybe John Keller will correct anything I get wrong about ES, or add comments of his own.
 
I will also echo the sentiment that I try to keep my views about William Tapley's religion entirely separate from my view of his notation system.
 
A good intro to each might be this http://musicnotation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Express-Stave-Guide--reverseES-1.pdf for ES (particuarly, see the chromatic scale a short way down the page) and the chromatic scale of Gabriel in his video about it (this links to the relevant point)https://youtu.be/Hza5c7easRI?t=910

Douglas Keislar

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Apr 6, 2021, 10:43:10 PM4/6/21
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I haven't been following this discussion closely, but I noticed this comment:

I am surprised that Mr Tapley made a pdf with 96 pages of music transcriptions back in 1987.

That's not quite possible, since Adobe introduced the PDF format in 1993. PostScript was present in 1987, though.

Also, I see that William Tapley's Gabriel Music Notation is documented in Gardner Read's book Source Book of Proposed Music Notation Reforms,  pp. 109-110. It was therefore known to Tom Reed before he initiated the Music Notation Modernization Association's evaluation project. The system was not included in the list of notations that were considered to have passed that project's "screens" (essentially the ones listed at http://musicnotation.org/systems/criteria/). Perhaps the screen it failed to pass was the following, because of its diamond-shaped noteheads:
17. Frequently used symbols must be at least as convenient to write in longhand as are the corresponding symbols of traditional notation.  For example, if the noteheads are all rectangular, or require unusually precise drawing, they take an unacceptably long time to draw.  Exceptions are allowed for symbols that provide some benefit missing from the traditional system, as long as the overall amount of time to write a typical piece of music is not noticeably longer than in traditional notation.
Doug

Mark Gould

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Apr 7, 2021, 2:18:34 AM4/7/21
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I'm going to be controversial here and say that ES is hard to draw in the same way because of the slanted note-heads. I really struggled in trying it out, and I'm used to copy writing scores.

It's important to note that for a lot of notations requiring shaped note-heads it's presumed the stave is quite large. Most composers used to larger format papers of 15(A4 landscape) 24 to 32 staves will know these are much smaller than the big 12 stave pads. I've found that if you were to reduce staves like ES down proportionally, it's very difficult to draw shaped heads accurately on a stave only 6mm high in total.

That's the acid test for me - can you write it clearly on orchestral stave papers? And that includes chords and multiple voice staves. 12mm high staves are like kids copy book size.

Mark



On 7 Apr 2021, at 03:43, Douglas Keislar <douglas...@gmail.com> wrote:



John Keller

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Apr 7, 2021, 1:17:25 PM4/7/21
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Hi Mark,

I just spent some time drawing ES notes on writing pad paper, with the ruled lines as L and the centre D-line as a legerline between. If anything, I found the horizontal small notes harder to draw. The slanting bigs are more natural as that is how cursive writing leans. Also when writing TN some people make all crotchet note heads slim and slanting 45 degree ovals - almost just a line.

In TN when drawing at small scale, the crotchets (filled note heads) in spaces have to be thin and horizontal so as not to overlap, while those on lines are more likely to be slanted and longer to ensure they protrude each side of the line equally. Drawing minims in spaces and on lines requires the same care at small scale. I can’t see how the ES shapes are any different to how you draw TN notes at small scale. Except you don’t get the grid guidance of the 5 line stave.

I drew scales and chords with both bluntish pencil, and pen. They don’t look too tidy, but are clearly readable. I have drawn ES notes a lot in the past of course, and done timing with TN comparisons. They are pretty equivalent. TN does look neater (except for legerlines and accidentals), but I don’t find ES hard to draw.

Cheers,
John


lettersquash

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Apr 7, 2021, 3:52:23 PM4/7/21
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I was also a little surprised that Mark found ES notation difficult. I wonder how note paper divided with another line compares with the size of stave he uses, since the scale will be crucial. Another variable will be writing implement. An ink nib will be quite different from a biro or pencil.

However, I understand why this criticism would discount Gabriel, since there are round, open notes, which require a relatively fine point, and diamond or parallelogram notes, which can be quickly written with a very large flat nib like a caligraphy pen (as someone already mentioned), but speed won't be enhanced by having to use two writing implements, and to fashion the filled shapes any other way would be very slow. Mr Tapley's tied notes are striped inside the head and apparently the outline of the head and the tail are also lightly dashed, although I guess in hand writing one could ignore this and write them normally.

They require much greater accuracy of placement than ES. Indeed, reading Tapley's own score there were several points where it was not immediately clear whether the open head was adjacent to the line or overlapping it, since some (all? - I'm still not sure!) of the overlapping notes are not centred on the line. B sits highish overlapping the line by about a third, and C sits on it. Similarly, E is touching the line above, and F has just its top third overlapping it. It is quite difficult to be so accurate to make sure your note's edge is bang on a line or just over it without extreme care. Some I was only sure about from the context - not great in more complex harmonic pieces!

Having said that, I've already criticised the emphasis in the "rules" on ease of handwriting, since I believe the task at hand - devising a superior notation system - is so enormously difficult anyway (against the inertia of TN) that too rigorous a set of criteria is unwise, and because more and more composers seem to be using apps to write their music - even on a phone nowadays - which means the complexities of accurately setting the score are dealt with by the machine. However, I understand some will want to hand write their scores still, so it's a bit of a balancing act. The goal of developing a superior notation system will involve compromises; it's a question of which ones.
¬~

Mark Gould

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Apr 7, 2021, 4:49:55 PM4/7/21
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Hi John,

Well, obviously we will have to differ on this point. Maybe because i'm left handed. I spent quite a few years copying up and making arrangements for orchestras in my teens and 20s, writing both on large format and small. I can only speak from my own experience, but though ES is not difficult on large staves, I found it very hard to get the slanted heads looking uniform on small staves, often leaning outside of one stave line more than the other, which may be misread for a note misplaced far too easily. Plus, the hovering bs and fs invariably ended up very near a line to add to the confusion. 

My other concern is when printed small too. No doubt you have seen the microscopic stave sizes used for miniature scores. I have the opinion that to some extent notation, like written language has some 'redundancy' built in, so that if slightly unreadable it is possible to make a good guess. I think there has to be a little 'fault tolerance' in the notation for musicians to read at speed.

I have seen your earlier versions of ES, and if I may be bold, I think, at the price of some pitch proportionality a version could work for smaller sizes. But, as Bartok pointed out, the point behind reform of notation is to give each of the twelve pitches their own place, and ultimately this has always meant for me, not to replicate the black and white notes of the piano as a basis, but to in some way ensure that the notes are truly independent symbols.

I still do not think there is an ideal notation. But we can all try. 

Kind regards

Mark

On 7 Apr 2021, at 18:17, John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:

Hi Mark,

John Keller

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Apr 7, 2021, 5:20:29 PM4/7/21
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Mark,

I should have asked you if you were left handed! I certainly thought it, because the right slanting slashes are much easier to draw for me than left sloping ones. For a right handed person, the right leaning note-slashes only require a small wrist movement. For me, left leaning note-slashes require a delicate finger action. You would find just the opposite.

I think this totally explains our difference.

John


John Keller

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Apr 7, 2021, 5:30:23 PM4/7/21
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Mark,

You could try a left hander's version! There is no reason the bigs have to slope one way rather than the other.

Also, where did you read Bartok’s comments about alternative notation?

Cheers,
John


lettersquash

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Apr 7, 2021, 7:38:36 PM4/7/21
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Hi Mark,

Yes, it occured to me that the slope favours the right handed. I'd be interested to know how you get on with John's suggestion of a reversal of that.

I was also interested in this: "the point behind reform of notation is to give each of the twelve pitches their own place, and ultimately this has always meant for me, not to replicate the black and white notes of the piano as a basis, but to in some way ensure that the notes are truly independent symbols."

The first part of that I fully support, but I don't think the latter is a practical goal (although it might be a superb ideal). Any radical reimagining of the chromatic scale to make it truly equitable would be unlikely to appeal to people. It would be too jarring.

We might, of course, rename the scale as 12 consecutive letters, but A-L in place of A-G# would be too confusing, since A# would now be B and B would be C, etc. So, do we start somewhere else? M-X? Do we give them numbers? 1-12? 0-11? And where would we start, the old A? C? Some microtone between E and F? Actual frequencies?

My sense is that the names of the notes are so deeply ingrained in ("Western") musical culture that all people will do faced with such a system is translate back to the old system...with the exception perhaps of the sharps and flats.

But the sequential alphabetic names A-G are so unlikely ever to be overturned that the attempt seems counterproductive, so we have "black" and "white" notes, whatever we call them.

The intermediate semitones can be renamed to avoid the connotation of flat or sharp, as John Keller does in Express Stave (and I've seen other versions). I am getting used to thinking of G# as L, but another system might prevail instead. They will still probably retain their old pair of names depending on context, too.

Not only is that particular disjointed pattern here to stay whether we like it or not, the piano keyboard is now an absolutely central musical icon. The clavier, piano or synth keyboard became the default device for musical expression and input over centuries, a trend that must surely be increasing in our connected and Westernized world (not that there aren't other important instruments and input devices).

There's a deeper perspective to this too - the diatonic scale isn't just some purely arbitrary nonsense a guy came up with once - it reflects something deep about our natural response to melody and harmony (even if some of that is a developmental or evolutionary process from pure harmonics through to equal temperament), and if we are to think in and around diatonic scales, we can't help but have a home one that stands for all (or we're just lost in a mess of 12 of them overlapping). Hence C major is here to stay. Don't you think?

Mark Gould

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Apr 7, 2021, 9:21:53 PM4/7/21
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Hi John

Here is Bartók writing in his essay The Problem of the New Music:

In conclusion, just a word about our notation. It was created on the basis of the diatonic system, and—exactly for this reason—it is utterly unfit for the written reproduction of atonal music. The accidentals, for instance, mean an alteration of the diatonic degrees. Here, now, it is not a matter of alteration or non-alteration of the diatonic degrees, but of twelve semitones of identical value. Furthermore it is rather difficult to observe consistency in the method of the notation; for instance, one often hesitates whether to pay attention to an easier legibility in the vertical or in the horizontal sense.

It would be desirable to have at one’s disposal a notation with twelve similar symbols, where each of the twelve tones would have a comparably equivalent symbol, in order to avoid the necessity of notating certain tones exclusively as alterations of others. Meanwhile, however, this invention awaits its inventor.

Mark Gould

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Apr 7, 2021, 9:42:03 PM4/7/21
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Hi

Some on here will know I have an article in Perspectives of New Music on diatonic and pentatonic scale structures and how their patterning can be applied to other microtonal divisions of the octave. TN conveys the 7 note diatonic regardless of the intonation (tuning), so it works for 12 equal tempered notes as it does for 17 or 19 or 31 divisions to the octave, or even an irregular tuning based on meantone or a tempered just intonation like Kirnberger or Werckmeister. The notation grows out of the scale. 

When an intonation scheme is being used independently of the diatonic scale then the notation becomes a hindrance to atonal or music that uses the 12 notes freely (or any other number of notes for that matter).

My own interest in notation stems from an intention to work towards an intonation neutral notation, one which is as capable of notating 13 divisions to the octave as 12 or 17 or 24 or any other number or an irregular scheme such as Just Intonation..  This is what drew me to looking at Equiton notation. But, this too has its faults in other ways.

For my part i have spent so long in the world of 'modernist' music and the writings of Perle, Babbitt and others that I use pitch class number notation: C=0 rising through each semitone to B = 11. To me, i find that considering a note as E flat or D sharp doesn't help my understanding of interval relations, so writing music in TN is a constant battle for clarity.  A keyboard based solution is no good to non keyboard instruments and the keyboard itself embeds the diatonic pattern which is the very thing I wish to avoid.

I'm always interested in notation proposals, because there is a good solution out there. But as Bartok says this ideal notation awaits its inventor.

Mark



On 8 Apr 2021, at 00:38, lettersquash <j.r.fr...@gmail.com> wrote:



Musical Supersystem

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Apr 7, 2021, 10:31:58 PM4/7/21
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On Wed, Apr 7, 2021 at 9:42 PM Mark Gould <equit...@gmail.com> wrote:


I'm always interested in notation proposals, because there is a good solution out there. But as Bartok says this ideal notation awaits its inventor.

Hi Mark
Mindset + preferences == the notation for you.
Consequentially there will not be a collective ideal notation, over the years my mindset has shifted and I think now I have a better understanding of what is going on, the fact is that a lot of the music these days is composed in a type of notation like Bartok and others  described.
 
TN, ES, Gabriel and the likes are creativity killers, even if you are able to sight-read music, the MNP mindset is outdated and got stuck.
Here is a composer and educator that has taken her time to explain what many others know.



YY.
 

John Keller

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Apr 7, 2021, 11:39:09 PM4/7/21
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I don’t get your point, YY!

So this lady jots down notes only she can understand. Then plays her composition from TN type-set normally (with key sig of 1 #) and promotes the Alfred publication.

How are new suggestions for a 12 note system without sharp or flat signs “creativity killers”?

What other “mindset" should MNP be taking??

By the way, look at her note-heads in the YT video. They are basically just right-slanting thickened lines.

John


Musical Supersystem

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Apr 8, 2021, 9:21:47 AM4/8/21
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On Wed, Apr 7, 2021 at 11:39 PM John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:
I don’t get your point, YY!

How are new suggestions for a 12 note system without sharp or flat signs “creativity killers”?

    HI John,
    Not all of them, there is one highly used to create music that a lot of the music that we hear today on the movies and everywhere at some point in the creative process has to do with it, it is the kind that she describes how a notation should be "for creating", and she is right on the money. 
    The times of using a napkin at a party to capture musical ideas in a type of "Guidonian -)" notation are gone, at a time when our watches and phones are recorders that send them to the cloud to later be processed by the most extraordinary tools that anyone could have imagined.
My point is simple, I do not see the interest or even the need for another all-in-one-for-everything notation, which is what I perceive is the MNP mindset, that solution was the right one for the time it was created, another mindset is using or looking for what everyone think is best for each activity including other than notation, while coping with TN, which is where my mindset has shifted.

YY

Musical Supersystem

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Apr 8, 2021, 11:38:00 AM4/8/21
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In other words, another mindset is looking for "solutions for activities", where said solutions could even be a combination of resources that may include some form of notation.
Competition among optimized solutions without involving TN seems to me more likely ahead than a continuation of the reform/simplification movement.
Complex TN piano scores are usually presented as proof for the need of alternative notations, but the best solution to play piano or keyboard does not necessarily have to be a simplification of TN; Klavar is an example of looking for optimization or fine-tuned solution for an activity, though it was not presented as such.
I see the present and near future consolidating and improving optimized or specialized solutions and hope can finally throw my hat in the ring.

YY     


lettersquash

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Apr 8, 2021, 3:51:39 PM4/8/21
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Hi Mark,

It seems that your ciriticism of novel notation systems that maintain a reference to the piano keys is due to your desire for an intonation-neutral system. However, I don't see that these are mutually exclusive.

From your recent posts I get the impression that you are well versed in music theory, so I imagine you have absorbed all the analytical structures of musical theory based on the traditional system. Having done all that hard work, you seem to want to transcend its limitations, which is great, but I wonder if the level of expertise you've gained is a relatively rare condition, and your "good solution" would be of much less importance to the general populace. What you want is pretty niche. I'm also not sure what stops you devising exactly the notation system you want, given the amount of knowledge you clearly have and knowing your own needs.

On the other hand, what I feel is most important in regards to design of novel notation systems is to allow access to the joys of learning, playing, reading and composing music to the very large number of people who don't have whatever capacities are required to reach base camp. This may not interest you, because your interest is elsewhere, in the high peaks of musical relativism, but this should not stop you appreciating the value of a simpler system that might meet the needs of the ordinary person and reduce the awful drop-out rate from music studies.

Within that remit of a simple, generalist musical system, I would again suggest that the prevalence of the standard piano keyboard as instrument, composition aid, MIDI interface and musical icon means that it is well suited as its basis, or as some part of its symbolic vocabulary. In contrast, I cannot imagine that a highly relative system, with enormous potential for cutting-edge microntonal work, would be as difficult as TN, if not more difficult, for the average Joe or Joanna.

What percentage of music people listen to and want to play is atonal or micro-tonal? That's the percent you appear to be dismissing because you're into the inverse proportion. As I say, of course, it's a valid alternative. Has the NMNA set a clear goal - is it after a generalist solution or something highly extensible, capable of notating every avant garde dream? (Actually, the latter is often conveyed with TN and a few pages of detailed instruction to players and conductors, since it is virtually an impossible dream to notate all our mental soundscapes.)

Mark Gould

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Apr 8, 2021, 5:32:45 PM4/8/21
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Hi

I know i have a specialist interest in notation, but the result need not be 'niche'. But at the same time, if notation reform is going to 'take hold' it needs to flexible, and not just ossify a different set of rules. A good solution makes simple music notatable simply and complex music notatable efficiently in the same system. If you've seen the performance directions for Ferneyhough's "Unity Capsule" for flute or the Bartolozzi manuals on extended woodwind techniques, you'll see how it takes more pages to set up the notation than write the piece. Surely there must be something wrong in a notation that requires more explanation than the work written using it?

As a for instance, a substantial amount of non western music uses intonation schemes that aren't 12 divisions to the octave. I don't think Arabian, Persian, Indian and East Asian classical musicians would appreciate being forced into using a western construct for their art, let alone the avant garde. Why should we not be able to use the same basis for notating all music, inclusively? This is certainly not a niche interest.

For the vast majority in the west (and increasingly so in the east) the 'halberstadt' keyboard is the primary access to music making outside of other instruments. But, given other instruments don't have a 7+5 system (think of all the subtleties of violin intonational nuancing in playing Mozart or Haydn), to force everyone to think in keyboard terms seems to my mind the wrong way to go about notation. Imagine for a moment if all instruments had to play from guitar TAB? Tablature for the piano is not a bad thing, but it's not a general purpose notation.

The simple reality is that the vast literature of TN that is present to day isn't going to go away. The best we can hope to achieve ultimately is to a leave a trace in the history of the development of TN, which will continue to evolve. Trying out new ideas is what's important here, and why we have this forum.

Mark

lettersquash

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Apr 8, 2021, 9:02:17 PM4/8/21
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Hi Mark,

"I know i have a specialist interest in notation, but the result need not be 'niche'."

"Specialist" means "niche".

"But at the same time, if notation reform is going to 'take hold' it needs to flexible, and not just ossify a different set of rules."

"Ossify" is a negative term. If a notation is going to 'take hold', it will have rules, and those rules will have to 'take hold'. Structure is necessary for creativity. What do you want - a system with no rules? Without rules, it's not a sytem. If it has them, why won't they "ossify"? You can't just magically invoke a "flexible" system to sove that problem. All its flexibility must be encoded in rules. Or it's just nonsense.

"A good solution makes simple music notatable simply and complex music notatable efficiently in the same system."

Within limits, yes, but for it to have the latter capacity, it is a complex system, and it's a difficult thing to achieve. Your sentence actually describes key signature notation as it relates to simple (C-major) and complex (lots of sharps or flats) keys. It does the former "simply" and the latter "efficiently". And most of us hate it.

'If you've seen the performance directions for Ferneyhough's "Unity Capsule" for flute or the Bartolozzi manuals on extended woodwind techniques, you'll see how it takes more pages to set up the notation than write the piece. Surely there must be something wrong in a notation that requires more explanation than the work written using it?'

It would be worse trying to inject all that information into your notation system! The "explanation" of a system capable of notating complex music within its symbolic language would consist of all the learning one has to do to know how to read and write it.

The variables we might use to describe a piece of music are practically infinite, depending on how precise we are in measuring them and how often we take samples. There is no point trying to devise a system to encapsulate all possible forms in all the various genres...especially when composers make it their interminable duty to break the rules and make up something unwritable!

The exclusion of Eastern music by favouring a Western-inspired notation is merely incidental. I'm a Westerner. I'm interested in a notation system primarily for Western music - for the same reason: too much capacity to be complex is impossible to put in a simple system; it just becomes a complex system.

"For the vast majority in the west (and increasingly so in the east) the 'halberstadt' keyboard is the primary access to music making outside of other instruments. But, given other instruments don't have a 7+5 system (think of all the subtleties of violin intonational nuancing in playing Mozart or Haydn), to force everyone to think in keyboard terms seems to my mind the wrong way to go about notation. Imagine for a moment if all instruments had to play from guitar TAB? Tablature for the piano is not a bad thing, but it's not a general purpose notation."

I think you're conflating different things here. There may be "subtleties of violin intonational nuancing", and presumably violinists don't see black and white piano keys in their heads when they play. But the notes they use - every last one of them - belong to the same set, the 7+5 system, as do those of every other instrument in the Western tradition. Ask a violinist what note she's playing and she'll tell you one of those names. Devising a new system that continues to honour that long tradition is not "forc[ing] everyone to think in keyboard terms" it's piggybacking on the ubiquity of the 7-5 system.

We're thinking of this from opposite ends, it seems to me. The keyboard isn't the origin of the diatonic scale so it doesn't force anything, it's just one of the finest mechanical expressions of it, and the origin of the scale is deep in our musical heritage and our musical brains. It's based on how hollow tubes and strings vibrate, which humans have found beautiful for millennia. We don't force people to think in octaves or fifths. they're natural phenomena. Sure, you can go on making more novel divisions, but it's not going to be popular, it's going to be specialist.

I agree there will probably be a lot more use of instrument- and genre-specific systems (tablature of a sort), even personalised notation printing via computer app, so you and I could play Bach or Bartok together, you using your system, me following mine. But I think any system capable of wide implementation will have some relation to the familiar 7-5. It's a long lesson from history: if you want people to adopt something new, start with something they already know.

John F

John Keller

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Apr 9, 2021, 1:47:10 AM4/9/21
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Hey John F,

I want to press the ‘like' button on your post! Well written and convincing.

Hi Mark,

For the kind of system you would like, how about a 12 et set of notes evenly pitch proportional, with octave similarity, but with added new accidentals #, b, x, and bb, to subdivide the semitones into 5, making a 60 et octave division. Furthermore the pitches could be defined in frequency or ratio terms at the start.

You mentioned using pitch class numbers instead of letter names. Why then choose C as 0? why not A, or L, or any other random note? This cements the C major diatonic scale just as much as a keyboard colouring would.

When you were championing Equitone, did it bother you that the system did not have pitch proportionality? (A black and a white note head both occupy each line and space.)

Are you more happy with a 6-6 system like Clairnote?

Have you got any idea of the type of system you want? Would it be some kind of numerical notation instead of graphical?

Cheers,
John Keller


Mark Gould

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Apr 9, 2021, 3:42:59 AM4/9/21
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I think I may have to unsubscribe as I disagree with almost every point on Lettersquash's post.

My view is piano based notations are tablature. Period.

String players will tell you s D flat is very definitely not a C sharp.

I was not suggesting that the notation do everything - witness the hypercomplex notation that is Panot (the full version not just the scale)

Other intonation systems are natural to other cultures. I do not get the 'western' bias.

The 7+5 system is an outgrowth of a particular scheme of representing the diatonic scale. In global terms it is just one scale. To insist on its primacy is to be frank, cultural colonialism.

A general notation will be like a programming language, it has a syntax and semantics but you can write any programme you like. 

Again, i feel the focus of the forum is very narrow minded, looking for a solution in piano tablature, with very notation-possessive people. Look outwards not inwards!

Mark

On 9 Apr 2021, at 06:47, John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:

Hey John F,

John Keller

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Apr 9, 2021, 4:22:20 AM4/9/21
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Hey Mark,

PLEASE don’t unsubscribe! 

I play violin and viola, I know we play C# and Db with different fingers, but how we intonate them is by ear in my opinion. People may think of them as different entities, even piano players do this. But C# in an A major chord will be lower than the same C# in an unaccompanied A major scale. (just 3rd vs Pythagorean) Db will have a similar pitch range. They may overlap. I have played orchestral parts on viola from ES in the past. No complaints from the others. 

Please stay and convince me (us). 

I renamed my system as Pianoforte Notation. It is now not claiming to have wider usage. Thanks for trying the handwriting. Did you try it with the left leaning notes?

I would be most interested if you can flesh together some kind of Universal Notation that doesn’t reference the traditional terminology or keyboard layout. I will look up Panot notation.

Please show us a way to look outward!

Sorry if I offended you; it was not intended.

regards
John Keller

John Keller

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Apr 9, 2021, 5:43:08 AM4/9/21
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Here is a huge pdf regarding Panot.
The first section is all text, then rhythmic considerations.

Very interesting how the author goes into every conceivable aspect in great detail and new terminology.

Of interest to me is the pitch stuff which starts around p216.
The staff lines are a major 3rd (4 semitones) apart.
C is the legerline, E and L the full lines.
Quite logical and easy to read, but not as compact as “Tranot” (TN).
And as far as I can see, just 12 et.

John K



Mark Gould

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Apr 9, 2021, 5:43:37 AM4/9/21
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Hi John and others,

Let me be clear about what I think MNP should be about: Music Notation.

Initially, I started looking, like other composers before me, for a notation in the that is 'twelve tone' that is, based on a scale of twelve equal steps. It just so happens that you can represent the diatonic in it but the usage by composers from Mussorgsky/Wagner onwards is of a twelve-tone scale, witness the enharmonic equivalence of the minor third transpositions of the diminished seventh chord or the use of octatonic and whole-tone scales in music which have no basis in the diatonic concept.  Using a scale of twelve equal steps, and writing such music in TN misconstrues music composed using a 12-Equal scale.

But writing diatonic music in a 7+5 system by throwing out the sharps and flats because a keyboard doesn't have them is throwing out the conceptual baby of the diatonic scale with the bathwater of accidentals. Putting a piece of diatonic music written in a 7+5 piano tablature in front of a violinist misconstrues the music. This is my beef with 7+5 notations - it confuses the keyboard representation and its enharmonic 'temperament' with the conceptual idea of the diatonic scale based on fifths and thirds harmonically and tetrachords melodically. It destroys the relationships that TN evolved to explain. Because it's hard on a piano, because it doesn't have an A-sharp key AND a B-flat key and so forth, so to replace it with a notation *that corresponds to the keys on the piano* for ease of teaching and playing  is not a music notation but a tablature.

My interest in notation initially stemmed as I said from my development as a composer in the direction of the free and equal treatment of the twelve tones. Writing in TN becomes a chore and misconstrues the implications of the notes in the music I (and a whole host of names I could mention who are far greater composers than me) write.

Only later, once I had digested the understanding of scales from their intonational viewpoint - which led to my interest in microtonal or intonational schemes other than those of the diatonic tetrachords and modes - that I realised that what we need was a *new notation* for music, one that does not 'presuppose' and then shoehorn the music into a scheme into which does not fit it. Hence my interest in a neutral notation.

Some know I devised an alternative rhythmic notation for Equiton, which uses but three simple principles, that of 'division', 'connection' and the 'dot' to arrive a notation for any rhythm you care to imagine. So I believe we can achieve the same for pitch notation using the same ideas. Think for a moment on what a note on a scale is - it is 'on a line', 'in a space', 'above', 'below' and so forth. It must be possible to use these principles to arrive at a pitch notation *principle* that means all musics can be notated.

Hence my dismay when I see 'my tablature is better than your tablature' discussions endlessly discussing what are points of physical representation of notes on a keyboard and readability for performers. That is a completely different matter from music notation, and detracts from the ideal of the MNP. I know tablatures of this sort are conflated and confused with music notation, but I've yet to see people suggest Guitar or Lute tablature being suggested as an alternative notation for music.

I'm sorry I take this view and if it upsets some, so be it. I couldn't care less about the piano and its ubiquity. But I do care very much about music and that it be notated so that it doesn't lose the meaning the composer meant.

Mark

On 9 Apr 2021, at 09:22, John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:

Hey Mark,

Mark Gould

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HI John

Yes, that pdf is a huge thing to even comprehend. Sadly, as you point out, the basis by Skrapski of Panot is 12ET. The microtonal section (which I was interested in) turns out to fall conceptually back into the mess of accidentals via a musical equivalent of 'diatcritical marks' on 12ET notes. So not it's not a solution.

But, as you can see from that text, a 'total' mechanism, built from the 'outside in' results in something evidently that looks like a kind of 'martian' music. It's a huge project, but it drowns in its details. Hence that to build from the ground 'upwards' to arrive at a notation that may actually be different for different scales but will always have exactly the same principles behind it.

Mark


On 9 Apr 2021, at 10:43, John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:

Here is a huge pdf regarding Panot.

John Keller

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Apr 9, 2021, 6:52:41 AM4/9/21
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Hi Mark,

I get your paragraph about Mussorgsky/Wagner. I love the shifting ambiguous tonality possible and requiring a 12 et tuning (also jazz harmony).

But I would disagree with what you imply in the next paragraph. Simply writing an F# is a different concept if it is the 3rd of the D major chord than if its the next just 5th after B. I don’t think violinists actually play the A# consistently. As a leading note to B, they say play it higher (which sounds wrong to my ears), but at the same time, as the 3rd of the dominant chord, it needs to be flatter than et. 

Ive said this all before, but I don’t understand exactly how the A# and Bb would be defined pitch wise on a piano that had split keys instead of what I call H. Which would sound higher? Notes go up, but pitch goes down?

You say 5ths and 3rds are defined harmonically and tetrachords melodically, but in practice both occur at the same time.

Do you still want 12-tone music not to have the inconvenience of writing accidentals, yet diatonic-based music to have them reinstated? How would a Universal Notation cope with both the demands of Wager and Mozart?

Maybe a kind of hybrid ES where for Mozart you omitted the 'extras' and just put back key signatures and accidentals?? 

What about if ES coloured all notes the same, just relied on the alternating shapes in the chromatic scale, Would this still be piano ‘tablature’? Or had a three note recurring pattern as in tricolour ES?

Im serious!

Cheers,
John Keller


Mark Gould

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Apr 9, 2021, 7:41:08 AM4/9/21
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HI John

I see this has become a long reply... for which I am sorry - but hopefully not a redundant sentence.

To answer your point about sharps and flats, which is higher than the other - in a true pitch continuum they are symbols for the accidentals required to represent an interval either vertically or horizontally. The actual note played will depend as you say, on the context of the notes around it. 

For the technically minded, the discrepancy follows the principle that so many 'thirds' do not equal so many octaves, and so many fifths do not equal so many octaves nor some other number of thirds. The differences (like that found between the B# when writing C E G# B# and C and similarly when ascending so many perfect (just intonation) fifths are all small differences singers and instrumentalists know and love (or hate) as commas. The diatonic scale contains commas if tuned correctly, as the A above the F will need adjusting to be in tune with the F as a major third and then retuned to be a fifth above the D. D itself also finds itself moving depending on whether it too is a fifth below the altered A or the fifth above the G. Such adjustments are often made by ear on the fly, and can (in solo choral music) cause the infamous rise or drop in pitch that makes choral and instrumental music very difficult to keep 'in tune'.

Commas aside, depending on how you tune the fifth, whether nearly perfect in the case of 12ET, or very flat in the case of meantone (a much used tuning from the early Baroque period to the late 19th century), the position of sharps and flats move around. A fifth flatter than 12ET results in Sharps *lower* than flats, but a wider or larger fifth results in sharps higher than flats. But this is again 'representation', and hence the need to be on our guard and not confuse them with the underlying pattern. Split keys on a piano therefore are tuned differently if one is using a wider 5th over a narrow one. I have seen the "Archicembalo" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archicembalo) 31-note octaves and I am sure most keyboard players would throw up their hands in despair over all the extra keys in amongst the seven notes of the diatonic!

I agree we need representations that are (in no particular order):

1. Easy to read both for identifying a given intended note, but also registrally where it is.
2. Convey the meaning of the music as well as the notes
3. Allow for visual 'analysis' of intervals/chords etc
4. Represent the rhythmic or temporal component of the music clearly
5. Allow for the comprehension of larger shapes (phrases and so forth)
6. Et cetera from the MNP criteria.

I've always believed that pitch proportionality is a good thing, but that it can be taken to the logical extreme, and thereby dismiss a notation that resolves point 3 more congenially but then include a notation that is visually very difficult for point 1.

Compromises are inevitable in any notation, but we must not confuse what we are representing with the thing represented, and thereby lose the meaning of the thing represented.  And worse, exclude other possibilities as a result.

Kind regards,

Mark

John Keller

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Apr 9, 2021, 9:03:19 AM4/9/21
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Hi Mark,

I am enjoying our conversation (debate). Your reply was not too long.

Actually I am kind of hyped up due to the drugs I have to take when having chemotherapy which I did today (3rd session of 6 at 3-weekly intervals). Also, engaging with you in this distracts me from the fact Im not supposed to feel well on chemo. And I am avoiding going to bed as I probably won’t be able to sleep.

I understand all the stuff about sharps and flats and commas and choirs. Interesting that you say they are not defined notes, but symbols for intervals which can be variously defined.

So my question back to you is:  Would these intervals be just as readily understood from a 12 et with 12 unique letters or symbols rather than including # or b alteration symbols? I assume you mean from point 3 that you couldn’t easily analyse intervals and chords without the # or flat signs. (I think you can of course.)

Interesting - on the question whether A# or Bb is higher. So a violinist has to know if the tuning is mean-tone or et? Or is the #/b adjustment done automatically by tuning the strings with smaller 5ths as in mean-tone?

I do ask you a lot of questions! I really would like you to consider them. But no pressure!

Would you consider ES a 'piano tablature' if the notes were all filled in?
What about if the notes were coloured 6-6? (Bigs - CDEKLH would be white, Smalls - ABIJFG would be black.)

What about my option to drop the extras for classical era compositions and use key signature and accidentals. Still keeping the naturals in their correct pitch proportions, with octave and clef similarity?

Is the fact that I don’t treat middle C as the start of the scale (by dropping its TN legerline appearance) a plus or minus in your opinion? i.e. Is using the alphabet unit ABCDEFG rather than CDEFGAB, a good or bad idea?

Regards,
John


John Keller

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Apr 9, 2021, 9:15:12 AM4/9/21
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Hi Mark,

We disagree only on the 12 et point. I think its a good starting place, just as the naturals are a good starting place for the 12 key signature system of sharps and flats.

I just don’t like making C the legerline. L would be better!

Yes the total system does look like an alien’s invention and totally overwhelming and impractical.

Building for the ground upwards sounds good, but where to start? Specially if you want it to be completely agnostic re scale structure.

John


J R Freestone

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Apr 9, 2021, 10:29:04 AM4/9/21
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Hi all,

There's a lot to catch up on today, which will have to wait until later and I look forward to. I just had to make a quick reply to echo the pleas not to unsubscribe, Mark - or at least do so just from the long thread I started and my recent post that you disagree with so much!

I've had it pointed out to me before that I come across as more confident and forceful than I realise. In fact, I'm pushing myself to express my opinions boldly, but with all sorts of self-doubts I don't express (my posts are long enough as it is!). So please be assured I know what a noob I am in this subject and I've only just found the website and joined this forum. I know little more than the basics of music theory, and only play keyboard (with beginner-to-intermediate skills), guitar (with almost no reading ability), and a little footling about on a concert flute, treble recorder and penny whistle, and I completely value and honour other people's deeper knowledge of all this. Incidentally, because I'm much more shaky inside than I come across, I'm very grateful for your supportive response, JK.

My personal ambition in returning to piano studies at nearly 60 is partly because I've been humming Bach for decades, love it, but keep getting it wrong and don't understand it enough, so I'm trying to learn more reading skills. And I don't have a great deal of interest in music outside of Baroque!

That's when I began to wonder if there's an easier route, and why I have to spend inordinate amounts of time grinding through 24+ scales and endlessly decoding key sigs and accidentals. It hit home most severely in learning Chopin's Prelude in E minor, where THE SAME note suddenly changes its notation! It was explained to me at pianostreet forum that this is because of some details of the cadence intended...fair enough, but I don't think of music theoretically much. I just want an easy way to learn it, at least at first. I became passionate about all the people even less competent than I am giving up because it's so hard to learn TN, because it's so insane.

I reacted a little strongly to your view, because it's one thing to keep coming up against resistance from the traditionalists, who have already spent decades absorbing TN, another to see a different kind of obstacle (to the direction that seems to me most likely to solve that problem of all the dispossessed ex-musos out there) from the radical end, people who want to chuck out any reference to the diatonic scale and think it's "cultural colonialism". (I'm not sure how I honour my musical heritage, in that case, and I think that view is frankly "snowflake". I hope you'll forgive me being as frank in return.)

But - getting back to the main issue - these are just DIFFERENT PROJECTS. I wonder if that's what's at the bottom of this, that we all landed on the same space (because there aren't many websites looking at it so intently) but we have completely different central aims. The criteria for inclusion of a novel system are somewhat arbitrary, because they don't seem to follow from a clear remit, a mission statement. Unfortunately, any clearly-enough defined mission statement will discount many other avenues of exploration, unless it defines several different sub-projects. It could, but it doesn't seem to, so we all just go round in circles disagreeing about the Most Important Thing.

I really value the critique of my views, though, Mark, and thank you.
John F

Mark Gould

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Apr 9, 2021, 3:07:42 PM4/9/21
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Hi All 

Some questions have arisen which I would like to answer, but they need some preparation.

But I wish to make it clear that I don't have a problem with piano tablature, just about calling it a music notation.

Regarding the other points, I will get to them, but without an understanding of why we have sharps and flats in the first place is going to hamper the equally important understanding of why we have a keyboard as we do, and the 12ET tuning we have.

If I knew how to solve the problem of notation I would have done so already. All I wish to do is make sure it's clear *what* the particular problem we want to solve *is*. Otherwise we end up talking at cross purposes.

Kind regards

Mark

J R Freestone

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Apr 10, 2021, 3:55:51 PM4/10/21
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Mark,

I've had more time to digest some of this. I'm at a loss to know what you really want.


On 09/04/2021 08:42, Mark Gould wrote:

I think I may have to unsubscribe as I disagree with almost every point on Lettersquash's post.

I'm not sure why disagreement would warrant unsubscribing from a discussion. It's what makes discussion useful.



My view is piano based notations are tablature. Period.

You say that as though it's an insult. What's wrong with "tablature" if it helps composers communicate and players read and play?



String players will tell you s D flat is very definitely not a C sharp.

But that's a product of the diatonic scale you want to get away from! And it applies to pianos as well as violins (we just can't tune it on the fly)! That's exactly what I'm told on pianostreet forum when I complain that Chopin has suddenly decided to notate the same note two different ways in the same bar! Honour the diatonic music theory! It's general in Western music (and probably many other systems). In piano music in TN, when do you see a Db that is ALSO a C#? Never. They are written differently due to choices about the key the music is in.

But the schemes you criticise don't distinguish between these alternative names; they ignore the difference; they have fixed the problem of semitones taking on spurious frequencies and meanings due to the diatonic bias - now they're just (implied ET) frequency divisions along with the naturals (and actually, the different interpretation of a note applies to the naturals as well, just in a different key, unless I'm much mistaken).

You wrote about this yourself as an aspect of the 12-tone Method, which you seem to favour and have indicated should be the basis of a general notation system. https://equitonpress.wordpress.com/2020/01/27/some-basic-concepts-behind-the-twelve-tone-method/

You say, "Let us take the notes C D F E-Flat and B. If we transpose these upwards by a minor 6th, we would arrive at A-Flat, B-Flat, D-Flat, C-Flat and G. Whilst this is correct in one sense, we should see that in fact every one of these notes is transposed up by 8 semitones. So we must think in those terms. This makes is possible to understand that those original notes, when transposed upwards by 8 semitones, can also be written as G#, A#, C#, B and G."

John Keller has gone a step further, since there is no G# or Ab in his notation, just the single entity he calls L. It seems that when there are indicators of the diatonic scale, you rail against them, and when they're taken away you complain that violinists want the differences to be validated. Even Cornelis Pot ranted about the idiocy of sharps and flats - and got rid of them.



I was not suggesting that the notation do everything - witness the hypercomplex notation that is Panot (the full version not just the scale)

You seemed to be suggesting just that. You used the term "general notation system" and required that we honour all genres from around the world (except the diatonic, apparently).



Other intonation systems are natural to other cultures. I do not get the 'western' bias.

Other cultures have other notation systems. I do not seek to undermine them or subsume their idosyncratic qualities in some overarching uber-musik. My 'western bias' is a pragmatic issue. It comes from a recognition that a there is no such thing as a "general notation system" and never will be (and you've provided evidence why it would be an abomination if it were - someone got close and it looks like the wiring diagram of a Ford Focus). I don't waste time trying to dream up the impossible.



The 7+5 system is an outgrowth of a particular scheme of representing the diatonic scale. In global terms it is just one scale. To insist on its primacy is to be frank, cultural colonialism.

Did anyone "insist on its primacy"? And isn't the goal of a general notation system a little closer to suggesting primacy of that system?



A general notation will be like a programming language, it has a syntax and semantics but you can write any programme you like.

You would have to explain in what way it would be "like" a programming language. Programming languages are entirely specific. No program or programming language has ever been capable of writing "anything you like", so what makes you think a music notation is going to be such a beast?

Programs (in all manner of languages) will probably be important in the future of music notation, but probably in allowing us to personalize the many iconic aspects of the image (or other medium - we must not ignore the blind and partially sighted, etc.) to suit particular instruments and players' preferences, "tablatures", if you like. This is entirely the opposite direction from that of generality of notation. Another enormous improvement is likely to develop in machine transcription of audio input. I look forward to a great democratisation of musical expression.


Again, i feel the focus of the forum is very narrow minded, looking for a solution in piano tablature, with very notation-possessive people. Look outwards not inwards!

Well, I'm new here, so I can't judge how much that's true, but there are a lot of notation proposals on the website with a 6-6 scheme and no hint of pianos or diatonic scales. Are they not represented in the discussions here? To be fair to ideas like ES, by the way, you should acknowledge that even if the diatonic is represented in the coloured notes, the whole-tone scale has been accommodated as well in the head shapes.

All the best
John

John Keller

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Apr 10, 2021, 10:38:37 PM4/10/21
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I think Mark has left the forum. He emailed me privately but we ended up at an impasse. I found he was unwilling to answer my questions or have a dialogue. He is basically totally against the 12 et system and totally for the infinite line of 5ths with sharps and flats at opposite ends, and no possibility of any other terminology.

This is despite writing about the 12-tone serial system.

John, thanks for the references to his Wordpress blogs, I hadn’t found this before, basically because i was looking for Equitone instead of Equiton.

I might later copy some of my emails here in which I described ES theory regarding how to follow tonality around the key clock while reading ES.

Meanwhile I have been practicing reading Gabriel notation.

Cheers,
John Keller


J R Freestone

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Apr 11, 2021, 11:55:38 AM4/11/21
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Hi John and all,


On 11/04/2021 03:20, John Keller wrote:
I think Mark has left the forum.
Oh dear, that's a pity, but it looked like it was on the cards.


He emailed me privately but we ended up at an impasse. I found he was unwilling to answer my questions or have a dialogue. He is basically totally against the 12 et system and totally for the infinite line of 5ths with sharps and flats at opposite ends, and no possibility of any other terminology.
That doesn't surprise me.


This is despite writing about the 12-tone serial system.

John, thanks for the references to his Wordpress blogs, I hadn’t found this before, basically because i was looking for Equitone instead of Equiton.
I'm sorry I didn't get to compliment him on his time designation invention for that, which have some really good features. I like those dots to indicate number of beats a note extends for (although some tweaking might be necessary for higher numbers or you'd not read them - ooh, die shapes are easy to read! - might have to nick that idea...). The divisions of beats with linked hoops or brackets is interesting, too, although I found it a little hard to read (most things are at first though). After some deliberation, I think the TN system isn't great. The Klavarskribo method is suboptimal too. As you probably know, there's a continuation dot on the line/space for a playing note when another note begins, which undoes the general rule that a note sounds until another note plays or there's a stop sign. It has the nice feature that chords that build up are overt as new notes are added, but it's useful when playing to have the duration of a note signaled at its start, perhaps. On the other hand, you then have to remember how long it's played to figure out when to release it!


I might later copy some of my emails here in which I described ES theory regarding how to follow tonality around the key clock while reading ES.
That would be very interesting.


Meanwhile I have been practicing reading Gabriel notation.
I look forward to any findings.

Cheers,
John Keller
Thanks for your more diplomatic approach than I could muster, and your support in the things I was saying.
Cheers
John Freestone

Mark Gould

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Apr 12, 2021, 8:46:15 PM4/12/21
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Hi John,

I am glad you liked my attempt at solving the problem of rhythm notation. I still think it's a work in progress, so I would be interested to hear of improvements. I'd puzzled about lots of dots too. I didn't include it in the text, but one possible way is to use the beat numeral instead, a bit like this

7
O

Where O is the note symbol. At the time (it's some years ago), I was repeatedly told that complex rhythms and the like are 'hard to count' in the prevailing 'beat' or tempo, so I saw the need to 'package' the music accordingly.

The curvy lines/brackets could be replaced with square lines a bit like joined 1/8th notes, and divisions nested accordingly. I got the whole idea from nested expressions in mathematics.

I won't mention 12ET notations any more as it seems it is a contentious issue here.

Regards

Mark

Mark Gould

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Apr 12, 2021, 8:46:16 PM4/12/21
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Dear all,

As a last try, I have included a couple of you tube links to music by Vicentino. This is not unknown music, but it demonstrates what I have been trying to explain



I would really like to know how you would write this in ES. There are passages that contain deliberate enharmonic shifts, say Db C# or D# Eb in the same voice.

 I am not totally against 12ET, I just think diatonic music cannot be written in a 12 tone notation, for the reasons I continue to give. Let me be clear here:

Diatonic music Is not equal to 12 tone music. Playing diatonic music in 12ET is 'translating it' into 12ET. Something is being lost in that translation and I am trying to point this out.

On the other hand, 12 tone music (meaning music written explicitly for 12ET)  can be written in and needs a 12 tone notation. I am trying to demonstrate why I believe this to be so, and why I believe there is a difference between the two. And why I have an interest in music notation, both 12 tone and the more esoteric forms that depict actual tonal relations accurately.

This is why I have no trouble with H as a key from german nomenclature as it's a chromatic tone, but I have problem with ES's H I J K and L because they erase the enharmonic relation.

In my writings about 12 tone music I am forced by convention to use TN to depict 12 tone examples, so I didn't appreciate being taken out of context. If we had a 12 tone notation that people generally understood then my examples would have been in that. 

It is imperative to understand the enharmonic relation in diatonic music, and it's impossible to discuss music notation properly without an appreciation of the real structures in diatonic music and what tuning systems do when representing enharmonics or removing them in the case of 12ET. I don't think people appreciate there are many subtleties and intricacies, and so often people start with the keyboard, and thereby miss entirely the richness of tonality.

The paradox is that composers from the renaissance onwards, especially Bach expected the enharmonic relation to work both ways, as an equivalence (g#=ab) and as *two different notes*. The legacy of this is still with us today. 

I hope this goes some way to explaining my position, and until people get the ideas about what diatonic music is and how it relates to tuning and temperament, I don't believe a useful conversation can be had about notation.

Regards

Mark

Mark Gould

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Apr 12, 2021, 8:46:32 PM4/12/21
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Mark Gould

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Apr 12, 2021, 8:46:32 PM4/12/21
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Hi John,

I am glad you liked my attempt at solving the problem of rhythm notation. I still think it's a work in progress, so I would be interested to hear of improvements. I'd puzzled about lots of dots too. I didn't include it in the text, but one possible way is to use the beat numeral instead, a bit like this

7
O

Where O is the note symbol. At the time (it's some years ago), I was repeatedly told that complex rhythms and the like are 'hard to count' in the prevailing 'beat' or tempo, so I saw the need to 'package' the music accordingly.

The curvy lines/brackets could be replaced with square lines a bit like joined 1/8th notes, and divisions nested accordingly. I got the whole idea from nested expressions in mathematics.

I won't mention 12ET notations any more as it seems it is a contentious issue here.

Regards

Mark

On 11 Apr 2021, at 16:55, J R Freestone wrote:

I'm sorry I didn't get to compliment him on his time designation invention for that, which have some really good features. I like those dots to indicate number of beats a note extends for (although some tweaking might be necessary for higher numbers or you'd not read them - ooh, die shapes are easy to read! - might have to nick that idea...). The divisions of beats with linked hoops or brackets is interesting, too, although I found it a little hard to read (most things are at first though).

John Keller

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Apr 12, 2021, 10:03:41 PM4/12/21
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This is my response, copied from our private email conversation:

Hi Mark,

I would really like to know how you would write this in ES. There are passages that contain deliberate enharmonic shifts, say Db C# or D# Eb in the same voice.

In the harpsichord piece, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhGwjgZ8zIY I see there are 4 of each black key but only two symbols, namely a sharp or a flat, (no doubles). And I notice that the lower manual is tuned a tone lower than A440. 

I also see that the player (whose name is Keller!!) changes to the top manual on some notes that are not changed enharmonically, but have what appears to be a staccato mark.

Evidently the instructions for the keyboard construction was dictated by the composer, and out of the 4 choices of black keys and two choices of white keys, he has given instructions as to which manual and split key to use, either by the enharmonic or another marking.

ES could similarly use some symbols to indicate the same instructions for such music.

You can clearly see the black key groups of two and three on the top manual, so one could easily identify IJ and KLH if that was the terminology the player was used to, and they were reading ES.

Not sure about the extra keys on the lower manual.

I am not convinced that the enharmonics alone fully describe this performance.

I have answered your question Mark!

By the way, I used the HIJKL names in my masters degree 12-tone analysis at Indiana University.

Now a question for you.

Can you hear which of the written F# or Gb in alto at 2.04 is higher? 

(I can’t isolate the individual notes enough, I just hear a weird tonal shift.)

Cheers,
John Keller


On 11 Apr 2021, at 4:50 pm, Mark Gould <equit...@gmail.com> wrote:

John,

As a last try, I have included a couple of you tube links to music by Vicentino. This is not unknown music, but it demonstrates what I have been trying to explain



I would really like to know how you would write this in ES. There are passages that contain deliberate enharmonic shifts, say Db C# or D# Eb in the same voice.

I did see the last two posts on the group. I am not totally against 12ET, I just think diatonic music cannot be written in a 12 tone notation. 12 tone music can be written in and needs such a notation. I was trying to demonstrate why I believe this to be so, and why I believe there is a difference between the two. And why I have an interest in music notation, both 12 tone and the more esoteric forms that depict actual tonal relations accurately.

This is why I have no trouble with H as a key in german as it's a chromatic tone, but I have problem with your H I J K and L because they erase the enharmonic relation.

In my writings about 12 tone music I am forced by convention to use TN to depict 12 tone examples, so I didn't appreciate being taken out of context. If we had a 12 tone notation that people generally understood then my examples would have been in that. 

It is imperative to understand the enharmonic relation in diatonic music, and it's impossible to discuss music notation properly without an appreciation of the real structures in diatonic music and what tuning systems do when representing it, or removing it in the case of 12ET. I don't think people appreciate there are many subtleties and intricacies, and so often people start with the keyboard, and thereby miss entirely the richness of tonality.

The paradox is that composers from the renaissance onwards, especially Bach expected the enharmonic relation to work both ways, as an equivalence (g#=ab) and as *two different notes*. The legacy of this is still with us today. 

I hope this goes some way to explaining my position.

Regards

Mark


On 10 Apr 2021, at 12:23, John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:

Mark,

Are there other groups you are in or could join to get more satisfaction with your ideas?

Good luck with your endeavours!

I guess we have indeed come to an impasse. 

You say there are no such keys as K major or J minor. I have played in them since the age of 17 and I’m now 72! They are the Black Key Etude and the Barcarolle of Chopin. They are the Eb minor prelude and D# minor fugue in WTC Bk 1 of J S Bach. Why do most editions reprint the fugue in Eb minor? When I play it in J, there is zero information lost.

What about the German key H? Does it exist or not? 

OK I am bombarding you with questions again.

Bye for now,
John

On 10 Apr 2021, at 8:51 pm, Mark Gould <equit...@gmail.com> wrote:

John

I think we will also have to beg to differ - you simply cannot consider diatonic music without thinking in sharps and flats. Doing what you do merely exposes the issue central to temperament, but 'elides' it. The thinking is still there but you merely 'use the symbol' which is just the same as pressing a key on the piano. The problem is that I think you misunderstand the purpose of notation. The problem is that 'reformed' notation schemes *start* with the a priori notion of the twelve notes - which is fundamental disconnect between what TN is *for* and what composers/theorists devised reformed notations for a very different music. The confusion is down to the piano keyboard and I've already tried to dispose of the 'tablature' issue. 

The 'key clock' you mention is a direct result of the ET scale, but this is a 'representation', of the line of fifths. We can make other 'clocks' of 19 / 31 and other numbers that embed a representation of the diatonic within. Are they wrong? No they are not, and these do include sharps and flats. Would we, if we had such a keyboard as the 19 tone one, be arguing about this in the same way? This is hypothetical, I grant, but it exposes deep misunderstandings about "notation". And why we don't have 'K major' or 'L minor', as your key clock would imply.

I did a private email because I have decided to leave the group. I feel I am beating my head against a brick wall of understanding - that the 12 tone scale and the diatonic scale (including the different keys) are *completely different things*. They cannot ever  be equated. This is the fundamental failure of modern music theory. It leads everyone into the trap that the diatonic scale *is* the white notes of the piano and that A flat *is* g sharp. It isn't, and the sooner people realise this the better it would be. The Diatonic Scale is a construct with implications and ramifications far far wider. TN makes a stab at capturing those relations, but it is imperfect. The issue is that people sit at a piano keyboard and think what they see is *all there is* - it's not - it's a shadow of something, and then perceptually they lose the real thing that lies beyond what the piano keyboard merely represents. 

There is a deep semantic issue here which is obscured by the 'syntax' of notation. If you understand the semantics of the diatonic scale, you cannot do without the ideas of chromatic alteration and so forth. But, composers in the 20th century got to understand they were no longer writing using that scale so its structures were no longer relevant. Hence their desire for a notation that didn't require chromatic alteration of notes. Notation reform is linked very firmly to a development of the language, and this is completely different requirement for a 'notation' that gives each key on the piano its own note. TN is designed for 'tonal' music because it makes no 'temperament requirement' for how you might play it; why shoehorn it into a 12-tone notation?

I'm going to leave it there.

Mark


On 10 Apr 2021, at 11:02, John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:

My paragraph showed that by considering tonal movement around the key clock, this is the equivalent of your thinking in terms of sharp or flat keys, but I just think of the right or left side of the key clock and relative movement around it. I tried to go into the ES theory to show you that there is an equivalence without necessary keeping the complexity of enharmonic note naming.

I feel we are not communicating too well here, in that I ask specific questions, but you reply with your generalised theory without answering me.

I do understand most of the points you make here. I will look into the renaissance vocal music, but I get the impression you don’t really try to look at my points or consider my specific questions much.

On another topic, Im wondering why you have opted to do private email to me instead of the public forum? Part of my aim is to air my thoughts and explanations more widely so as to attract various diverse responses.

And why have you labelled this email stream “ledger lines”??

Just curious!

Maybe we need a meta-discussion.

Maybe your idea of a music notation is much wider that the 12 note criterion of the MNP, so no suggested systems in this site would satisfy you.

Do you like TN? Do you want to expand it to a more comprehensive system which accommodates commas, deliniations of E as major thirds vs 4 perfect 5ths etc? What about all the different TN clefs? Keep or unify? What instruments do you play yourself?

More question, I know, i am sorry …

Regards,
John


On 10 Apr 2021, at 7:03 pm, Mark Gould <equit...@gmail.com> wrote:

HI John

This paragraph illustrates the point I have been making all along. Diatonic music *requires* an understanding that there are sharps and flats, you cannot interpret this music without them. The keyboard is a convenience for the *performance* or *rendering* of this music. The scale and its structures lie *outside* this rendering.

For some, they just want to make sure they want to press the correct key, but as sooon as you want to know what's going on in the music, you need to know when a note is a sharp or a flat or even a double sharp or a double flat.

My circle of fifths was meant to say - this is what diatonic music is - an endless sequence, within which we make music. We *approximate* this infinity. TN has evolved to notate this infinity, and it is *interpreted* as 'enharmonic' at a point for a given tuning/temperament. I suggest you acquaint yourself with renaissance vocal music to understand just how big this infinity is; d'India, Gesualdo, Vicentino.

Even the line of fifths as you know is only a tiny part of the story, as when major thirds intrude, we get even more variety of pitches (the E a proper major third above the C is not the same as the E four fifths above). So the reality of diatonic music is huge. TN is silent on the matter of 'commas' and other very small intervals. For reasons of practicality, we find a pair of points on the 'line of fifths' that lie close enough together to declare "we will assume them to be the same note and adjust all the fifths accordingly", and from this a temperament happens. And not just at the Ab = G# point.

When I speak of notation, I am thinking of the richness of musical expression. Notation is on the one hand a convenience, but it is _not_ the basis of the music - it is a 'representation' of something far more complex. To remove the sharps and flats from diatonic music then misses the meaning for its basis. Its a bit like a colour palette - you can render an image in a few colours or even black and white, but something is lost from the original, but the original is still there implying the full range of colour.

But, when one *chooses* the basis of music to be the twelve tones (and therefore _not diatonic_), then TN becomes a chore. And this is leaving aside any other possible scales.

Regards

Mark

On 10 Apr 2021, at 03:04, John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:


I would keep the sharp and flat terminology as a historical archive, just as we keep roman numerals, but they don’t appear in the notation as # or b signs. But you can discern them in a piece by these methods above. In fact, in playing from ES, I must mentally track the tonality around the key clock in order to understand it, rather than just blindly pressing black and white keys.

Mark Gould

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Apr 13, 2021, 5:14:53 AM4/13/21
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Hi John

From our private emails, I reported that the tuning is meantone (1/4 comma) and that

1. The F# is lower than the Gb
2. The staccato dots mean 'play this note a diesis higher'. This could have been notated with double sharps or double flats as appropriate, so this music could have been notated without those dots.

I use the analogy of quantisation with 12ET. The 'real' notes are like the performance rhythms in Midi, these are what the composer intended, in the tuning they expected. The 12ET performance 'quantises' all the variant pitches into 12ET. If you choose a different quantisation, you get a different 'resolution' of pitch. But behind the different quantisations the real music still exists.

For me, I am thinking that music written in TN and expected to be performed in a different 'quantisation', such as extended 1/4 comma meantone, can't be written in 12ET based notations without having to put back in all the enharmonic notation. In these pieces, G# is not meant to be sounded as Ab, but if you write them in ES for example, with no extra indications, you lose the intention of the composer. 

TN was devised originally to indicate chant and choral music, and has grown from a music that originally knew only perfect or 'just' intonations. Music written in TN before the advent of 12ET (and quite a bit of music for voice and other variable pitch instruments written since temperaments were invented) implicitly recognises 'enharmonic' notes are not the same note. Writing such music in a 12ET notation removes these relations between the notes. 



Mark


On 13 Apr 2021, at 03:03, John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:

This is my response, copied from our private email conversation:
--
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tinma...@gmail.com

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Apr 16, 2021, 4:11:34 PM4/16/21
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Mark,

I've been investigating music notations from the perspective of computerizing them.

My original purpose was not to perform but to enter and edit.  I was planning to use the computer to play the accompaniment while I sing.

(Obviously, this paradigm could work for any solo performer.)

It occurred to me (and apparently many others) that it would be easier to invent a notation that is easy to computerize

than to computerize existing notation. So called piano roll is about the easiest to do. 
Klavarskribo, of course, was invented for the purpose of being mechanically produced.

If the computer is the performer, MIDI works well,
but it is missing some function the prevents it from being a satisfactory encoding for scores that will be read by human performers.

 

But looking at notation led me to your question: what is it we are really trying to notate?

Which ultimately gets to the question: what is music?

It seems to me music is about patterns and progressions:
Set an expectation, perhaps via repetition. 
Challenge it. 
Resolve it.

Repeat with a sequence of more interesting challenges.

 

If you accept my notion that music is about patterns and progressions, comparison and contrast,

then the "ideal"  notation would expose the patterns and progressions, similarities and contrasts.

It would not only express "letters"  but also syllables, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, etc.

It would enable one to recognize harmony and dissonance, theme and variation, climax and resolution, etc.

 

The simple rise and fall of notes on a staff exposes some of the "progression"  in melodies,

and I've experimented with shape notes as a way of exposing melody relative to scale or tonality.

I've used Pertchik's tri-color and my own quad-shape noteheads (Chromatonnetz) as a way of exposing harmonic intervals.

I've tried the ought-to-be simple idea of breaking lines at phrase boundaries to expose form

(it ought to be a lot simpler than it is in typical commercial score software).

I think traditional rhythm notation actually hides the rhythm, and coupled with the aversion to splitting lines at phrases,

obscures the repetition and progression of rhythm patterns.  I tend to favor time-proportional notations.

But I must confess to not having yet tackled the challenge of representing harmonic progressions, cadences, etc.

 

The other challenge for music notation is the beginning student.

Many proposals for a "better" notation seem to arise from the frustration of would-be musicians trying to master an instrument

while also having to decode our arcane notation. That should tell us something:

whatever the virtues of Traditional Notation, it might not be the best way to introduce students to music.

Why not have the student develop basic facility with an instrument, and learn the rudiments of *music*,  before forcing the student to decode "professional"  notation?

For that matter, with available technology, why not create instruments that are intuitively and ergonomically easier to play?

 

Joe Austin aka DrTechDaddy

"Music is Poetry;

Why print it as Prose?"

Mark Gould

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Apr 17, 2021, 4:21:16 AM4/17/21
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Hi Joe,

Your comments raise some interesting notions about what music is. Setting aside the actual notation of music, which had, like language, been sung and performed long before notation (in the vaguely "graph"-solution we have today) existed. As far as I recall, the earliest 'notation' of music was the 'pointing' on poetry as it was sung, so it's interesting to note your comparison with music and poetry.

The difficulty with the 'look' of music is the 'packaging' as you say. Looking as I am at a Palestrina setting from my partner's collection of choral music, It would be impossible to 'split' this anywhere - everything overlaps, and the lines are incredibly 'long'. Consider even a Bach fugue, or the long passages of harmonic roving in Wagner, and you'd need pretty huge 'pages', electronic or otherwise to set down notation (of whatever kind).

Music notations generally revolve around time in one axis and pitch in the other. A score of an orchestral work demonstrates the multidimensional quality of music - you could depict such as score  in 3d with time and pitch as usual but with the 3rd axis representing instrumental timbre.

I'm sure you have seen these sorts of things (this is just one example of many)


I don't know the name of these graphic representations, and though it shows pitch and time in a way, and timbre in other ways, it's not obviously a notation. However, a notation as you describe would ultimately have aspects of the 'representation' this video shows.

Performers need a representation of pitch and time that makes sense relative to 'beat' and 'time' in a way that they can 'count it'. This is the reasoning behind my own work with rhythmic notation reform.

In terms of pitch, I have my own views, which don't align with most on here. Music not only needs to notate pitch, but like the use of language also needs to convey _meaning_. 12ET notations erase meaning in tonal music, which is my opinion.

There are many places in classical music where an augmented sixth chord occurs, which in its German form is indistinguishable from a dominant 7th in 12ET. However, TN depicts the Aug6th and conveys its meaning. This is just one of an infinitude of examples I can pull where notation conveys meaning beyond the sounds.

I can think of how one might render poetry in phonetic symbols, and thereby lose things like alliteration and other effects, because the actual word being used carries meanings beyond its sound. Such is the case in music notation. We must be careful when thinking of new notations for existing music, to ensure _meaning_ is not lost.

This seems to be a concern of many musicians, and I don't have a problem with 12ET notations for music _written in 12ET_, but TN implies far more than this.

So, I would like to add, that intonational schemes that are 'written into' the notation of TN are also part of the 'meaning' in patterns and progression, and if we reform 'notation' we should be mindful of this.

Kind regards

Mark

On 16 Apr 2021, at 21:11, tinma...@gmail.com wrote:



tinma...@gmail.com

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Apr 17, 2021, 3:59:35 PM4/17/21
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Mark,

Yes, but...

Regarding form:

When humans perform music, "lines" have a maximum effective length--how long one can sustain a breath, or the stroke of a bow, etc.

I understand in some polyphonic music, the voices overlap. But for any individual performer, there are still lines.

But I agree, the conductor score may be a challenge.

Some hymnals actually do break lines in the middle of a measure, to match the lyric breaks, yet we are still able to "count" the time.

My point is that it's often do-able to print 4 measures per line (the typical line length for a song), but publishers seem to prioritize saving paper.

Of course, if one is viewing the score on a tablet, as many do these days, there is no "paper" to save,

and it's easy enough to turn the screen landscape for longer lines.

 

Regarding accidentals vs equal temperament:

I've seen many arguments.  I've even read proposals to use strict just-intonation.

I would argue that if you really want to notate just intonation, you would want to at least distinguish a minor from a major third.

Traditional notation obscures the difference by using the same staff separation for both major thirds, e.g. C-E, and minor thirds,

e.g. E-G.  Even traditional sharps and flats are not enough.

True just/Pythagorean/diatonic notation would seem to require at least two and up to four separate Pythagorean scales for all possible "stacked thirds"  tetradic chords,

even limiting the intervals to 1:2:3:4:5:6  (octave, fourth/fifth, and major/minor thirds/sixths) and multiples. And that doesn't even include 1:3:5:7 chords, etc.

12-TET is satisfactory for equal-tempered instruments, and I would suspect, for modern orchestral scores.

Soloists on continuous-pitch instruments might be better served by some kind of shape-note or numerical system,

which could identify the exact pitch or interval intended.

So I claim it is disingenuous to advocate for TN vs 12-tone on the grounds of "just" intonation--neither is fully satisfactory.

If you really want to preserve the "meaning" of pre-ET music, you must of course address tuning as well as notation.

Some performers actually do this.

 

Both of the above suggest that the ideal individual performer's score may need to be part and instrument specific,

yet reconcilable to a generic reference notation for the composer/conductor.

With modern computer technology, this is not unreasonable.

 

I have been focusing  my efforts on the sort of pieces that appear in typical beginner methods and pop fake-books--

typically 16-32-bar songs, 1-4 pages, perhaps excerpted from longer classical works.

I think this represents the most problematic area--the "music" encountered by the beginner.

I suspect that, for larger works, the performer does not really "read" so much as use the score as cue-cards to supplement memory.

Indeed, virtuoso performers typically perform completely from memory.  And folk artists perform "by ear."

 

Joe Austin aka DrTechDaddy

 

 

From: musicn...@googlegroups.com <musicn...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Mark Gould
Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2021 4:21 AM
To: musicn...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [MNP] Gabriel Music Notation by William Tapley

 

Hi Joe,

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Mark Gould

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Apr 17, 2021, 5:12:44 PM4/17/21
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Joe,

I would like to clear up the point about Just Intonation. I was not advocating that at all. TN is hopeless with JI, witness the many examples in the literature of 'comma pumps'. Additionally, Ben Johnston uses JI in his music in an extended form, requiring a mass of new accidentals, which I would think would need extensive preparation. 

Musicians, if they are using their ears will adjust pitch even on wind and brass instruments as well as strings and voice. My particular issue is that in music, there are occasions when say, a Db is written, and the composer and performer will, even across centuries, come to probably the same idea as to what note is intended, without extensive annotation. However, if they were to write this note as a C#, it means something different. There are many examples of this in many composers' works. 

I simply suggest that these meanings be respected in music. I don't think all composers worked that way, but certainly composers working in the pre 12ET period, and for a long while after, would not have written notes arbitrarily as one enharmonic or the other, and I just think that 12ET notations rob this music of an element of its nature and meaning. As a good example of this is in a great article by George Perle: "Scriabin's Self-Analyses" Music Analysis Vol. 3, No. 2 (Jul., 1984), pp. 101-122. 

I found this article very illuminating in respect of what a composer writes and what they _mean_ by what they write.

Kind regards

Mark

On 17 Apr 2021, at 20:59, tinma...@gmail.com wrote:



Mark,

Yes, but...


 

Regarding accidentals vs equal temperament:


So I claim it is disingenuous to advocate for TN vs 12-tone on the grounds of "just" intonation--neither is fully satisfactory.


If you really want to preserve the "meaning" of pre-ET music, you must of course address tuning as well as notation.

Some performers actually do this.

 


 

Joe Austin aka DrTechDaddy

John Keller

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Apr 17, 2021, 10:48:08 PM4/17/21
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Mark, 

When you say the composer would have ‘meant' something different if they wrote C# instead of Db, my question is Does the audience listener perceive this?

I would say that the composer and player might perceive a different “meaning” to C# and Db (e.g. as Eb7 or Eb German 6th chords), but if the audience doesn’t perceive it, or only perceives it after the note’s resolution, then its just a secret.

Its like a pun or a joke with spelling. It doesn’t actually work unless its spoken so you can’t tell by the pronunciation what is the spelling.

“Wunwun was a race horse and Tutu was one too. Wunwun won one race and Tutu won one too.”

This doesn’t work as word play if its all spelt out. The whole point should be from the audience's point of view, not the player or composer’s. The audience should be anticipating a note's resolution so as to understand its ‘meaning” as C# or Db. In fact it’s arguable that the composer’s intention is that the audience should not know which one it is, until the resolution is revealed. 

There is a good reason that the player themself should also perceive the intrigue of not knowing what the  resolution with be. They don’t need to have any special privilege above their audience.

John



Mark Gould

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Apr 18, 2021, 1:56:57 AM4/18/21
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John

We obviously hear music differently. I hear the german 6ths as german sixths. The classic example ofthe pun you speak is in Beethoven 5th in the slow movement when a dominant 7th from A flat is turned into a german sixth. If you can't hear the subtle shift in the violins on the change into a german 6th, as is quite clear in the score and the musicians _can_ see this, I am very surprised. 


There are occasions when a composer wants to cause harmonic puns, but, the reinterpretation of these notes is clearly marked here.

My question is - do you think this is irrelevant in notation terms? Would it have mattered if Beethoven had not used an F#? If you don't think so, you have ignored Beethoven's meaning. And that is what I find sad about this is that you would wreck Beethoven's intentions by writing this music in 12ET notation. 

Let let this drop as I can see you think I am completely wrong, even when I produce evidence that refures your argument. I have spoken with a number of professional musicians about this following our discussions, and they all agree, removing the difference between enharmonic pitches removes meaning from music written with tonal meanings implied. If you read the Perle article you'll see this there too.

Mark


On 18 Apr 2021, at 03:48, John Keller <jko...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:

Mark, 

John Freestone

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Apr 18, 2021, 4:59:36 AM4/18/21
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Mark,
So write Beethoven in TN. The invention of alternative notations doesn't destroy the old one, just as playing Beethoven on a synthesiser doesn't erase the great orchestral recordings. You know, you could argue that he wrote it with ink on paper using a quill and that was part of his "meaning".

Similarly with your "phonetics" argument, academics can still learn the etymology of words as the language evolves.

Welcome back!
John Freestone

John Keller

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Apr 18, 2021, 5:10:28 AM4/18/21
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Mark,

Thanks for understanding my point. I had a careful listen to this example on YouTube, but cannot hear any difference in the pitch between the soft Gb and loud F#. Maybe my hearing is deficient. But can I ask you again, which is higher in this case, the Gb or the F#?

(I think you might say the Gb is higher, but a violinist might say the F# is higher.)

The chord with the Gb is a diminished 7th because of A natural in violas and 2nds. Then on the forte, the basses and cellos play Ab. This downward baseline implies going to G next, so its not really a pun, in that the audience does expect this resolution here.

I would probably play this violin part in 3rd position on A string with fingers 234 on Eb, F, Gb, then on the fortissimo F# jump onto the E string with finger 1. But I would try to match the pitch I think.

So, yes, I think of them differently - different fingers, different positions, different timbres.  

I could only see the first page of the Perle article. Do I have to subscribe to Justor?

A good example of a pun where the audience is genuinely surprised, but the performer is alerted by the change of accidental, is in the Beethoven Pathetique sonata op 13, 1st movement slow section going into the development (Eb becomes D#).

Sorry to be persistent, but you are not arguing with just me, but the whole of the MNP website!

Cheers,
John

On 18 Apr 2021, at 3:56 pm, Mark Gould <equit...@gmail.com> wrote:


John

We obviously hear music differently. I hear the german 6ths as german sixths. The classic example ofthe pun you speak is in Beethoven 5th in the slow movement when a dominant 7th from A flat is turned into a german sixth. If you can't hear the subtle shift in the violins on the change into a german 6th, as is quite clear in the score and the musicians _can_ see this, I am very surprised. 
<image1.jpeg>

lettersquash

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Apr 18, 2021, 8:26:44 AM4/18/21
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FWIW, I don't think it's a matter of how many people argue one way or another, and I really don't think it's a question that has an objective truth about it. Like most of these issues about notation, we have different views.

Anyway, I was wanting to add a bit of a question relating to this sharp and flat thing. I opined a while ago - but I wasn't sure - that it would apply to naturals as well as "extras". Is that true? I mean, in another key, any natural would occupy the same harmonic relationship to the tonic as an F# or Gb.

If that's the case, does it have anything to say about the question of whether they are trully independent notes? I suppose a Cb might be used in place of a B, etc., but maybe more often a sharp or flat occurring in the key signature would be given a natural sign. Would you (Mark) argue that an F natural(ized) indicated in the key of G Major is not the same note as an F in a piece in F Major or C Major?

Although these are genuinely meant as questions for my better understanding, I hope you can see a potential problem I see in your disharmonic view of sharps and flats - it might be almost infinitely extensible, or at least involve several sets of names and notations for these occasionally non-enharmonic notes.

It also raises the question of whether you'd play some of those 'transposed' naturals differently - avoiding the open string, which presumably you can't tune on the fly (or maybe you can with bow pressure or something) - on viola or violin, etc.

My other observation is that this appears to be the same logic as I came across in the Chopin Prelude in E Minor. A few bars into the second section, an Ab (accidental) becomes a G# (accidental), which was one of the first things that reminded me of my frustration with TN - two notes appear to change in the chord, but only one of them does. Now, Chopin, IIRC, wrote this for piano, so he was aware that they would be enharmonic. It seems a clear indication that he was indeed trying to express a particular "meaning" (I might put this differently: that he was indicating a different theoretical harmonic motion; I think "meaning" is too strong for anything music can express).

So that might also be in your favour. However, even if he was communicating that to suitably educated players, and even audience members who know their theory, it certainly can't make any difference to the pitch when played. In my view, then, it is an interesting annotation, a footnote, little different to if he'd written in the margin, "I ripped this off from a bit of Bach," or, "I used to notate these both as Ab," or, "I was feeling a little queasy when I wrote this - please play it at my funeral."

Repeating my initial response to all of this: it doesn't matter how much your notation system manages to include, it will always leave vast amounts out. So which bits you're a mega-fan of seeing is a personal issue.

Best,
John Freestone

Mark Gould

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Apr 18, 2021, 1:06:22 PM4/18/21
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Hi John,

I think the violins go up a little so in this case F# is higher than the Gb, as you correctly point out their tendency to pull leading notes up. 

Even if they were the same pitch, it's just my point about it having been written as Gb then later as F# for the purposes of conveying his meaning... "it *was* this note, *now* I mean it as an aug 6th". 

As a corollary - how do you name intervals in Es, without the way that TN can label notes? Most 12ET notations could name them as some number of semitones. But, what would someone say who only had a 12ET version of the Aug6th Ic V7 I progression? The same issue happens with augmented seconds.

I forgot about the subscription thing. I have print copies of a good deal of the writings - this is in my copy of Perle's "The right notes". Not sure what subscriptions cost but:

A tiny synopsis is that composers use notation to convey meaning in their music, and that how notes are spelled (Gb or F# for example) is a key to understanding how a composer 'self analyses' their works through their notational choices. The main part of the article is about Scriabin's late piano music, which despite evidently being in 12ET, using octatonic scales and other types of 'pitch-class collections', Scriabin notates in a very consistent way to emphasise the interval cycles. This leads to bizarre spellings of notes and intervals, e.g. diminished 9ths or augmented 7ths instead of octaves, but from these spellings it is possible to get at Scriabin's meaning of the progressions and chords. 

In the Beethoven example the arrival of the D# can't be heard differently from an Eb, obviously. The notation conveys the meaning change, which is what I've been trying to make my point about. Lose that differentiation in notation and you lose the meaning.

On the other hand, this, from Schoenberg's 4th String Quartet

is meaningless in TN as none of those notations actually mean what they do: that 1st violin line looks like it's in a sort of extended Bb or Gminor which the TN implies. This music *needs* a 12ET notation. As does this from Bartok, which TN is having fits over trying to actually notate at all...


It's for this sort of music I see the need for 12ET notations, and why I am interested in MNP ideas.

Mark
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Mark Gould

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Apr 18, 2021, 1:22:10 PM4/18/21
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Hi John

That's an interesting one. Given the proximity of C and F to G major, these different Fs would be the same note, and probably so even for the most tidy minded of 'meantone tunings'.

But, if this were an E# (which is the main point of what I understood to be the discussion - does it matter to notate enharmonic notes as different notes in Tonal music - I think it does) then it's telling me something about what's happening in the music i.e. harmonic/tonal meaning, so it's not redundant notationally, which is what would happen if written in a 12ET notation.

Mark

PS thanks for the nice comments on my Equiton rhythm notation. It's still a 'work in progress', but I'm glad you saw it had some good points.

John Keller

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Apr 19, 2021, 7:08:54 PM4/19/21
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Hi Mark,

Regarding augmented 6th chords, you and i can both recognise them as listeners without seeing the notation. But in some cases, it isn’t clear until after the chord’s resolution.

In the Beethoven 5th symphony, if the Gb and F# are intoned the same, we would still be able to anticipate the resolution correctly because the bassline heads chromatically down to the expected G. So in this case, yes, the “meaning“ of the chord would be evident at the time of the chord, so even if F# was written as K, we both can know it would have been notated as F# in the TN, and can call the chord an Aug6.

But if you consider the Pathetique example, at the point where the D# is written instead of Eb, nothing can be deduced by the listener. The chord is exactly the same as previous, and the listener expects the same resolution back to a G minor chord. It is only at the next bass note, B natural, that the listener goes “Wow, that is unexpected, what is going to happen now?” 

So the “meaning" is only in the note B, and in a sense, the player, by seeing the prior enharmonic change of Eb to D#, is experiencing a “spoiler alert”! Beethoven doesn’t want any audience reaction at the instance of the D#. Whereas at the B, he thinks “Haha, this will get their attention!” So what you call the meaning of the D#, is a bit of extra information just for the performer, of what is coming up.

I think your use of “meaning” is too strong a word. It is just a convention. If its a sharp it will probably resolve up. If a flat, down. Its an added information to the player that is not for the listener to know.
As such, yes, in ES, the player loses a bit of information, but I think its better for the player to experience the music as the listener does, without the spoiler alerts.

ES intervals are measured in semitones. But with knowledge of TN conventions, distinguishing minor 7ths from augmented 6ths can be deduced from the context, particularly by the interval’s resolution.

I would be interested to read about Scriabin’s use of octatonic scales. I should think though, that such pitch class collections would benefit from a 12 note system without the convention of having to fit it into the 7 letter-name system of TN. 

Just as in jazz scales, if you want to extend the regular octatonic scale starting with ABC (tone, semitone),  in ES you get: A BC DJ FK LA. In TN you get: A BC DEb FGb AbBbb. So yes, the octave becomes a diminished 9th. Is this what the Scriabin article is about?

Thanks for continuing with these MNP discussions!

John Keller


On 19 Apr 2021, at 3:06 am, Mark Gould <equit...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi John,

I think the violins go up a little so in this case F# is higher than the Gb, as you correctly point out their tendency to pull leading notes up. 

Even if they were the same pitch, it's just my point about it having been written as Gb then later as F# for the purposes of conveying his meaning... "it *was* this note, *now* I mean it as an aug 6th". 

As a corollary - how do you name intervals in Es, without the way that TN can label notes? Most 12ET notations could name them as some number of semitones. But, what would someone say who only had a 12ET version of the Aug6th Ic V7 I progression? The same issue happens with augmented seconds.

I forgot about the subscription thing. I have print copies of a good deal of the writings - this is in my copy of Perle's "The right notes". Not sure what subscriptions cost but:

A tiny synopsis is that composers use notation to convey meaning in their music, and that how notes are spelled (Gb or F# for example) is a key to understanding how a composer 'self analyses' their works through their notational choices. The main part of the article is about Scriabin's late piano music, which despite evidently being in 12ET, using octatonic scales and other types of 'pitch-class collections', Scriabin notates in a very consistent way to emphasise the interval cycles. This leads to bizarre spellings of notes and intervals, e.g. diminished 9ths or augmented 7ths instead of octaves, but from these spellings it is possible to get at Scriabin's meaning of the progressions and chords. 

In the Beethoven example the arrival of the D# can't be heard differently from an Eb, obviously. The notation conveys the meaning change, which is what I've been trying to make my point about. Lose that differentiation in notation and you lose the meaning.

On the other hand, this, from Schoenberg's 4th String Quartet
<image2.jpeg>
is meaningless in TN as none of those notations actually mean what they do: that 1st violin line looks like it's in a sort of extended Bb or Gminor which the TN implies. This music *needs* a 12ET notation. As does this from Bartok, which TN is having fits over trying to actually notate at all...
<image3.jpeg>
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