Re: MusicXML representation of "additional" staff

There is a reservoir of outlier cases like this out there in the
literature. However, not all these cases are common, and most of them add
complexity and cost to the process of developing software to handle them.
When you are building a standard that you will ask everyone to conform to,
the cost of compliance is not trivial. Standards with too high a cost of
compliance, simply die.

MusicXML to date (and MEI too) have so far sidestepped this problem by
making it pretty much impossible to determine what "compliance" even means,
because so many elements and concepts are optional. Both encoders and
developers are free to choose what they will or will not support. We can
all see the results of that freedom.

I'd like to propose a different way of thinking about this. I'm not trying
to argue that, say these floating clefs either are, or are not, "authentic
Western music notation". But we can probably agree on several
uncontroversial facts:

- Floating clefs are not standard. They are pretty unusual and he number of
such cases in the literature is small.

- The cost to software developers of supporting arbitrary clef/note
associations is substantial (and is the reason why notation software
generally doesn't this case, not because of MusicXML). This expense is
**not the expense of merely encoding floating clefs**. It is the expense of
authoring features that would allow engravers to specify these
associations, and engraving features that would allow such clefs and notes
to be shown and positioned properly under many varying circumstances.

- There are alternative ways to notate such cases (e.g. adding extra staves
to a part as needed, bearing the additional clef)

Now, I talked in Frankfurt about Encoding Profiles (see
https://www.w3.org/community/music-notation/wiki/MusicXML_Use_Cases#Document_Profiles).
These are essentially "checkboxes" in a document that provide a way to say
that a score lives up to a certain set of practical expectations.

Let's say, for sake of argument, that we decided that floating clefs were
outside the Encoding Profile for "Standard CMN". This would not rule out
creating documents with floating clefs, or finding some way to encode them
semantically. What it would mean is that the documents including floating
clefs would not be allowed to include the "Standard CMN" profile checkbox.
And the consequences would be that we wouldn't expect software built for
the "Standard CMN" Profile to handle floating clefs.  And some developers
would be free to go the extra mile and produce or consume this encoding
anyway, if they felt the feature was important.

I will take up the actual merits and problems with floating clefs as music
notation some other time; I feel they ask a great deal of the reader. But
that doesn't matter. The main point is that they are an infrequent
compositional choice. I think we need to ground these debates in an
understanding of costs and benefits, and to be clear that profiles give us
a way to designate a core of notation within the standard to which
developers must conform. That is really valuable and it's one of the big
things missing from our ecosystem today. Putting things outside this core
doesn't make them illegitimate, and doesn't make them impossible to encode.
It just means that we understand that it is not realistic to oblige every
conforming developer to embrace those things, and that we want to make a
hard-edged declaration of what developers *must* support for a given
profile.

Best,
...Joe

.            .       .    .  . ...Joe

Joe Berkovitz
President
Noteflight LLC

+1 978 314 6271

49R Day Street
Somerville MA 02144
USA

"Bring music to life"
www.noteflight.com

On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 4:55 PM, Mark Johnson <mjears@gmail.com> wrote:

> Neither of these unusual examples is intended to shift the meaning of the
> clefs from their normal positions on the staff. The treble clef centered on
> the top staff line in Dennis’s example is quite misleading in my opinion.
> Debussy’s bass clef at least sits in mid-air, so it avoids the implication
> of being a different kind of bass clef.
>
> As for the cross staff notation, in piano music the staves indicate right
> hand and left hand, more than treble and bass clefs. It’s the only clear
> and compact way to indicate that this figure is played by both hands, and
> that aspect of the notation is quite standard.
>  MJ
>
>