Re: German Organ Tablature Subrange in SMuFL - Proposal

Hi John,

Thank you very much for your detailed proposal, and please accept my 
apologies for the lateness of my reply: I've been on holiday this week.

I have added your proposal as an issue to GitHub here:

https://github.com/w3c/smufl/issues/72

I have absolutely no objection to including this range in SMuFL in 
principle. The start position of the range will have to be modified, as I 
have added a couple of new ranges that are not yet published, but which I 
will publish very soon, but aside from that I think your proposal looks 
good to go.

Would you be willing to contribute any of your glyph designs from either 
of your fonts to Steinberg in order for us to add them to the reference 
Bravura font? (Note that this would mean contributing them to Steinberg 
rather than to the W3C Community Group, as Bravura is maintained solely by 
Steinberg and is not a product of the CG.)

Daniel



From:   John McKean <john.hansmann.mckean@gmail.com>
To:     public-music-notation-contrib@w3.org
Date:   25/06/2017 18:53
Subject:        German Organ Tablature Subrange in SMuFL - Proposal



Dear All,

About two years ago I first floated the idea of adding a range dedicated 
to German organ tablature to the SMuFL specification in a message posted 
to the smufl-discuss list. Since then, I have discussed my ideas in person 
with Daniel and several organ tablature experts, and have produced two 
organ tablature fonts. I feel the time is now right to make a formal 
proposal to the group for the inclusion of an organ tablature range in the 
next version of SMuFL.

-------------------------------------
BACKGROUND

German organ tablature was an important notational language for keyboard 
music during the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. It was the 'first' 
notational language of many North German keboardists, including Weckmann 
and Buxtehude, and even J.S. Bach made use of it. Organ tablature was not 
only used in hand-written manuscripts, but in print as well. The fact that 
16th and 17th century music publishers devised ways of typesetting 
tablature provides a useful precedent for developing organ tab music 
fonts.

After familiarizing myself with the orthographic conventions of a variety 
of manuscript tablatures and studying the ways in which early printers 
systematically broke down tablature notation into its component parts in 
order to produce metal type sorts for printing, I devised the following 
table of glyphs, which serves as my proposed encoding range in SMuFL:

https://github.com/jmckean83/Moeller/raw/master/German%20Organ%20Tablature%20SMuFL%20Range.pdf

I have also produced two organ tablature fonts using this framework:
Möller
Ammerbach
------------------------------------- 
ARGUMENT
 
The fact that sub-ranges have been set aside for French/English, 
Italian/Spanish, and German lute tablature, but not German organ tablature 
seems like a glaring incongruity to me. When I first suggested adding the 
sub-range, someone asked whether or not the necessary symbols for organ 
tablature could be cobbled together from other areas of the existing 
specification. The simple answer is: no. Although there is no shortage of 
alphabetic tablature letters in SMuFL, there is no dedicated or otherwise 
obvious place to encode the 'swash' characters used to denote accidentals; 
they are entirely unique. Moreover, the hatch-like representation of 
rhythmic flags common to organ tablature cannot be suitably represented 
using any of the rhythmic stems/flags already present in SMuFL. There is, 
in my opinion, a clear need and obvious justification for the 
establishment of a dedicated encoding sub-range.

------------------------------------- 
ENCODING AND USE

Not being aware of any other pending additions to the specification, I 
took U+ED60 as the starting point for my proposed organ tab range. This is 
two encoding slots after the last one included in the current 
specification (U+ED5D / Stockhausen Accidentals), thus leaving a 'buffer 
zone'; I'm not sure whether or not this is necessary. If not, two 
possibilities immediately come to mind: the organ tab range could simply 
be shifted up to begin at U+ED5E, or those two unaccounted for slots could 
be set aside for private use within the organ tab range.

Although no scoring software currently provides a feature for setting 
organ tablature, it is not inconceivable that such a facility could be 
made available in the future. This is particularly easy to imagine in the 
case of 'old' german organ tab, where the RH is notated in mensural staff 
notation, with the LH notes indicated in tab underneath the staff. As 
things stand, it doesn't take much work to create such notations using my 
tablature fonts and modified text styles within Sibelius. (See an example 
here.)

At present, the easiest way I've found to create notations in the 'new' 
German organ tab idiom is in a word processor like MS Word. To this end, 
the two tablature fonts that I've created thus far (see links above) 
present many of the constituent glyphs from the proposed U+ED60 - U+ED9F 
encoding range a second time, in standard alphanumeric encoding slots so 
that they can be easily typed using a computer keyboard without constantly 
having to copy from a character map or input them using cumbersome unicode 
values. (See a visual explanation here.) Ligature substitutions allow 
remote code-point glyphs to be easily accessed.

Some might argue that it would be simpler to just create special organ tab 
fonts using whatever encoding slots one wishes without regard to relating 
them to SMuFL at all, thereby obviating the need to add another range to 
the standard. While fonts such as the ones I've created (which aren't, in 
fact, SMuFL music fonts given the double-encoding of glyphs for practical 
input) are no less effective at present without SMuFL backing, I do think 
it would be in the long-term interest of the standard and its aim of being 
as comprehensive as possible to adopt this proposed organ tab sub-range. 
Who knows what uses future scoring programs or well-designed SMuFL music 
fonts might find for organ tab!

-------------------------------------  

Thanks for your indulgence with this long-winded email! I am eager to hear 
your thoughts/comments/feedback.

Regards,
John McKean




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