Re: transpose, transposition, and relative

[lilypond]

address@hidden wrote:
> I'll attempt to clarify again:
> transposition is something that allows midi to know how the music has 
> been transposed so that when you listen to a midi file, you hear what you 
> wrote, not what the transposed notes look like.

Okay. So the manual needs to say that. At the moment, the manual says that 
\transposition "should be used when music is entered".
> 
> transpose actually transposes the notes in the music.
> 
> so, if you want to transpose the following: relative c' { c4 d e f }, it 
> would look like this: transpose bes c' { relative c' { c4 d e f } }
> 
> to get appropriate-sounding midi playback, you would want something like 
> this:
> 
I'm not interested in midi. So \transpostion seems to be useless to me. The 
manual just says nothing about it :-(

And as for the workaround using "\transpose c bf" - well that's exactly that - 
a workaround. What the hell am I supposed to do when I'm coping with parts in 
Bf and D (trumpet), Bf and Ef (Cornet), Bb, Eb and C (Bass), Bb, C, Eb and G 
(Trombone) etc etc etc? My poor brain can't cope ... Even worse, what about the 
example in the manual, when I need to cope with D and G *in* *the* *same* 
*part*! (Horn).

What I *thought* \transposition did, and what the manual implies it does do, 
was convert parts to concert pitch as they were input.

If this were the case, then we don't need to give a damn about pitch and midi - 
it'll just come out right anyway. And we don't need to worry about getting 
confused over which part is transposed in which key - they are all internally 
in C.

So - can I respectfully suggest we have a big bug here - either in the manual 
or in the implementation of \transposition. And imho the bug should be in the 
implementation - by changing the implementation we don't change the current 
functionality as seen by the user, but we do make the manual correct, and we 
make the behaviour of \transposition both more consistent and more powerful.

Cheers,
Wol