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Re: Lilypond's internal pitch representation and microtonal notation


From: Joseph Wakeling
Subject: Re: Lilypond's internal pitch representation and microtonal notation
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2010 15:55:52 +0200
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On 09/20/2010 05:27 PM, Graham Percival wrote:
>> For arrowed quarter-tones the notation is described (and recommended) in
>> Kurt Stone's book "Music Notation in the Twentieth Century".
> 
> Excellent reference!  That book is frequently quoted on this list, so
> this should settle any question of "is it necessary".

I remembered that I have copies (from JSTOR) of a couple of articles
Stone wrote prior to the publication of the book, giving a very
condensed summary of the notation issues.

The attached PNG (I hope it is small enough to get through) gives the
appropriate paragraphs of that article.  The full citation is K. Stone,
Music Educators' Journal, vol. 63 no. 3 (Nov. 1976), pp. 54-61; it's
available online at:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3395098

Unfortunately it doesn't explicitly note the enharmonic issues in the
same way as the book, but their existence is obvious given the
accidentals described.

The article adds:

    Conferees of the International Conference on New Music Notation in
    Ghent ... preferred this arrowed set of accidentals for two reasons:
    (1) there has been increased acceptance of the arrow system among
    composers, even though there is not yet a clearly discernible
    preference for _any_ of the systems of adaptation shown; (2) arrows
    are superior in clarity to any of the other alterations because they
    are self-explanatory.  In other words, the conferees, in this case,
    based their choice on statistical as well as evaluative
    considerations.

Does that settle the matter adequately? :-)

Best wishes,

    -- Joe

Attachment: arrow-microtones.png
Description: PNG image


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