Re: Re: Proposed new available and recommended behavior of \relative

[Evan Driscoll]

On 3/9/2013 7:31 PM, Jim Long wrote:
> So if somehow I've made two consecutive correct postulates,
> wouldn't a user who used the mnemonic:
> 
> "If no reference pitch is given, then the first pitch after
> \relative is relative to f"
> 
> ...
> 
> So, addressing those who are put off by a perceived mixing of
> absolute and relative music inside \relative {}, does this
> mnemonic assuage your concerns:
> 
> "If \relative { ... } is specified without a reference pitch,
> the reference pitch defaults to f."


A day or two ago I said that as a new user I was against the change (but
not by much or with any actually meaningful objection) on account of the
mixing of absolute and relative. I didn't find the "the first note after
\relative [inside or outside of {}] is interpreted as absolute"
particularly compelling either for similar reasons. But I think I *have*
been swayed by the "\relative f" arguments.

A documentation description along the lines of either suggestion above
are a lot more attractive to me from a clarity and consistency point of
view than phrasing the behavior first in terms of absolute notes (as in
the "the first note after \relative").

However, it seems like that sentence should be immediately followed by
something that points out that the first note is then written "in"
absolute pitch. Something like "Note that when a pitch is written
relative to f, the relative and absolute representations of the note are
the same." *I* like that wording because it conveys the same feeling as
why I've changed my mind, which is that if I say "\relative { N }" it's
not really that N is written *in* absolute pitch, it's that it's still
relative to f but that the representations are identical.

But whatever... like I said before, i don't have much of a dog in the
fight. I am a pretty light user of Lilypond, I don't have a strong music
theory background, and I mostly just put octave signs in by compiling it
and seeing if they look right anyway. :-)


I'm still not sure that I would use it, and as a result I really don't
like the "let's change it with convert-ly" idea.

Actually, while I haven't used convert-ly so don't know how intelligent
and aggressive it is in changing things, it seems somewhat likely that
such a change could break the score for Mars that I'm working on now. In
retrospect I'm not sure this was the best way to do this, but I swiped
the following snippet from the docs:
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.16/Documentation/snippets/pitches#pitches-creating-a-sequence-of-notes-on-various-pitches,
which defines a command called "\rhythm" that you can use like "\rhythm
g" or "\rhythm c" to get the "da da da dum dum da da dum" rhythm on
whatever note you specify. Several of my parts start with "\rhythm g",
using "\relative C" where C is some octave of c. If that was converted
to "\rhythm g'" that would actually fail to work. If you take the
snippet from that page and put a \relative block around the actual
music, you'll see that the way the function is written, "\rhythm g'"
will raise the octave for every note in that rhythm.

Evan