Re: The MusicXML challenge and Chords

Hi Dennis,

you probably got me wrong. I'm not at all opposed to include some of these things into an encoding standard. It's just that I don't believe that it makes a lot of sense to seek completeness in this area (I actually share your concerns about the Magrathean extensions and other things), and that I find it hard to draw a clear line. However, a standard needs such a clear line. Of course Karkoschka's catalog (or at least the more frequently used parts of it) should be covered by a music standard. It's just that I can hardly imagine a standard for representing things like Logothetis' Odyssee (http://www.moz.ac.at/sem/lehre/ws09/ak/02form-farbe/scores/data/images/logothetis-odyssee-s2.jpg). However, there are some musical concepts in those pieces, which one might be able to detach from the graphical representation. I'm certainly all in to work on a representation of modern scores. All I'm saying is that they might require different approaches, based on their "alienation" from traditional scores. Sometimes, providing a curvature to an otherwise "standard-compatible" staff is sufficient, sometimes it'll take a whole lot more than this. One benefit of MEI is that it capsules different repertoires into separate modules. This means that not everything needs to work under the same hood, and additional concepts for 21st century notation don't have to complicate things for someone interested only in mensural notation. MusicXML has no such feature, but maybe it's a good idea to start thinking into this direction…

Best,
Johannes



Am 26.10.2015 um 19:33 schrieb Dennis Bathory-Kitsz <bathory@maltedmedia.com>:

> Johannes,
> 
> Certainly I'm not minimizing the difficulty.
> 
> And, as far as standardized notational elements go, I think that future
> editions of scores could use standarized symbols where deviation from the
> composer's original symbols is not a misrepresentation. Karkoschka cataloged
> those over 50 years ago.
> 
> My concern is that elements frequently used be incorporated. An example is a
> curved staff. In Staves (U+E020–U+E02F), one- through six-line glyphs are
> shown, while implementation by drawing is encouraged. The glyphs are largely
> typographical elements. If so, it seems to me that sets of curved staff glyphs
> should be included (sufficient to create basic circles, elipses and spirals).
> It's the only element missing (I believe) to render the Crumb and Stockhausen
> (or create text examples from them) -- so we're already caught up to 40 years
> ago. [After all, if 40 glyphs are reserved for "Magrathean Sagittal extension
> (insane precision) accidental diacritics (U+E458–U+E47F)" (ahem)...]
> 
> The Smith and Wolfe examples (and many of those in both "Notations" and
> "Notations21") require the presentation as part of the score. Perhaps your
> "drill-down" idea works here, but only if the layers were inverted -- i.e.,
> the SVG or parametric layer controls the notational layer.
> 
> [One of the failures of the font concept is that it doesn't carry with it (as
> far as I know) transformation information (which would solve the mezza di voce
> problem, for example).]
> 
> Okay, I'm sorry to take up time with this. Perhaps the standard should be for
> music notation ending about 1950, with the advent of music notation bound to
> its presentation?
> 
> Thanks,
> Dennis
> 
> 
> On Mon, October 26, 2015 1:11 pm, Johannes Kepper wrote:
>> Of course, everyone of us would love to support these kind of scores. The one
>> problem I always have is that there is not one such thing as 20th or 21st
>> century music notation – there are hundreds of them. It seems impossible to
>> capture the _graphical appearance_ of all of these things with the same
>> standard, unless we're willing to water the standard until it's hardly useful
>> anymore. The whole point of a standard is that it standardizes things, and
>> treats them according to a strictly defined set of rules. The whole point for
>> some of these scores is to break such rules. Of course, this is a
>> simplification on my end, and I know that this varies quite a lot, but I see
>> no benefit in adding hundreds, if not thousands of unique special cases to a
>> standard.
>> 
>> But, and here comes Andrew's mention of musical domains into play, it might be
>> possible to capture the logical meaning of those 20th and 21st century scores
>> under the hood of a commonly useful standard which still deserves this name.
>> But this, in my opinion, is only possible by ignoring the graphical appearance
>> of the score. I doubt that this is what you had in mind.
>> 
>> However, the situation is not too different from classical music, which is by
>> far less standardized than a quick look at some 19th century prints seems to
>> indicate. I'm working in a research project that seeks to trace Beethoven's
>> compositional processes by closely analyzing small excerpts of his
>> manuscripts. As his sketches are frequently incomplete in various ways
>> (surprise, surprise), we need to separate the logical meaning from the
>> graphical appearance, even for such simple things as two filled noteheads with
>> an attached stem. They could be quarters, they could be 8th notes with a
>> missing beam, they could be a tuplet with the middle note missing, etc. What
>> we do is we describe the logical content (or what we believe it to be…) using
>> MEI, and we connect every single item to an SVG shape on the page, indicating
>> how it was written by Beethoven. To make a long story short, we're using two
>> different standards – one for the music, and one for it's graphical rendition.
>> Both are closely connected, and both can concentrate on what they're good at…
> 
> 
>