Re:Chords and what they mean

[mskala]

On Sun, 20 Sep 2015, Flaming Hakama by Elaine wrote:
> However, if you view lilypond as a notation program,
> then the practical question becomes,
> if I want to print a certain chord symbol,
> what to I write for the input
> (and do I need to customize the chord symbol for that note set)?

Excellent point.  All this talk of chords on the list inspired me to try
to add chord names to one of my microtonal pieces.  There didn't seem much
point feeding the actual music (which is entered as note sets, not chord
names) into \chords , but I figured if I could find the right input to
produce each symbol I wanted, then I could just give \chords a sequence of
those inputs.

That didn't work very well - not only did my changed note names screw
things up, but I even found one case where as far as I can tell, two
identical inputs produced two different chord symbols.  This was a Bb7
harmonic chord, which in one case printed as B\flat\super{7 5} and in
another as B\flat\super{7 5 8} with as far as I can tell *identical* note
sets described by identical input.  I'll try to come up with a minimum
working example if this is of interest.

What seems like it would be most useful for me would be to forget about
LilyPond's chord-naming translation from note sets to symbols, and just
use markup to add symbols of my choice wherever I want them.  So that
raises the question:  what's the easiest or cleanest way to place markup
so that it will look like chord symbols, typically appearing above the
staff at the start of a bar, but a little after the barline, not right
above it?  Would it work to code it as some modified kind of rehearsal
marks, or maybe lyrics?

> You would "suspend" the third, but then play a 3rd anyway?
> Since the 5 is in every C chord (except augmented or diminished),
> why would "sus" have anything to do with 5?

Bear in mind that the original meaning of "suspend" here was not "remove,"
"raise," or "lower"... it came from classical harmony where a note from
the previous chord would continue into the new one so that it would end up
as the second or fourth of the new chord.  Then you'd remove the third of
the new chord so it wouldn't clash with the suspended note.  It's really
the *presence* of the second or fourth, and possibly only in the context
where that note was in the previous chord, that makes the chord a
suspended chord.  It's not the absence of the third; the third is not the
thing that's being suspended.  And so if we're using that definition of
suspension, a chord with just the root and fifth, such as might be written
C5 , is not suspended.  I realize this is not necessarily the current
usage of the term.

-- 
Matthew Skala
address@hidden                 People before principles.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/