Re: proposal: second style for quartertone accidentals

[Trevor Bača]

On 2/4/07, Maximilian Albert <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> motivated by Orm's proposal to make arrowed accidental glyphs available,
> I have started a few experiments with the feta mf-sources. They seem to
> be quite promising, and I think that we will soon be able to provide the
> "arrowed" style as an alternative -- for a suitable meaning of "soon",
> though, since Orm and I are both rather busy at the moment.
>
> However, in the process of playing around there have arisen a few
> questions. They are currently mostly with regard to the actual glyph
> design (I haven't tampered much with the engraving code yet).

< snip >

> 7) Since I have never used quartertones and other microtones myself: Is
> there a difference between, say, a sharp sign with arrow down and a
> natural sign with arrow up? As far as I understand it, both denote a
> quartertone above the note they are attached to, right? Would it be
> desireable to use both of them simultaneously? (If I am not missing
> something, this might cause a syntax problem when the cascaded approach
> is used.)

Depends on the composer and possibly even the particular score.

One way of using the arrowed glyps is as you describe with enharmonic
equivalence.

Another way (and the one that I see more often ... but this may just
be a side-effect of the particular scores I'm looking at) is that any
up-arrowed glyph simply means "ever so slightly sharp of whatever
accidental I'm attached to" and the "ever so slightly flat" for any
down-arrowed glyph. This allows for, for example, the following
downward sequence of distinct pitches:

* C natural
* C down-arrowed natural (just barely flat of C natural, but not as
flat as C quartertone flat)
* C up-arrowed quarterflat (just barely sharp of C quarterflat)
* C quarterflat (precisely one quartertone flat of C natural)
* C down-arrowed quarterflat (just barely flat of C quarterflat)
* etc ...


--
Trevor Bača
address@hidden