Re: Special fermatas (8.4.4 in the .35 docs)

[Juergen Reuter]

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006, Graham Percival wrote:

> Does anybody know why this doc section exists?  It introduces four 
> articulation marks that are covered in Articulation.

Hi!

Long time ago, when people where repeatingly asking for "contemporary 
music notation" and when I also had the feeling that some modern 
notational features were missing, I added clusters and special fermatas. 
Similar to ancient notation, I added these in an extra section of the 
manual in order to (1) show users that we are going to add limited support 
for contemporary notation and (2) not to intermingle too much with 
classical notation (I may be wrong, but I had the feeling that the main 
authors at that time were happy to keep such "strange" notation features 
separate from "usual" notation).  IIRC, at that time, special fermatas did 
not show up in Section 6.5.1 of the manual (maybe the list of articulation 
signs is nowadays automatically created from the scm sources?).

Additionally, there was discussion on how the overall structure of the 
manual should be: (a) either by (implementation driven) categorization of 
features (e.g. articulations, clefs, noteheads, etc. as categories) -> 
"technical/reference manual", or (b) by (user driven) notational style 
(vocal/instrumental music, ancient/classical/jazz/contemporary notation) 
-> "user manual".  The current structure of the manual is a mixture of 
both approaches.

I agree that it is not good to have special fermatas appear in both 
sections, 6.5.1 and 8.4.4.  I guess (but I have not checked) that they 
appear in 6.5.1 because the table in this section was/is automatically 
created from the scm sources.  I feel a little bit uncomfortable with 
completetly removing the fermatas from Section 8.4.4, because it is handy 
to have it there for people who want to look for all contemporary music 
features without having to scan through the complete manual.  Maybe in 
Section 8.4 there should be at least a link to Section 6.5.1, mentioning 
that there are some contemporary fermatas in the articulations section?

Please also note, that Section 7.7 (ancient notation) is in a comparable 
situation.  For example, all the ancient clefs could be moved to Section 
6.3.1, but then Section 6.3.1 would somewhat explode in size, thus making 
it difficult to read for users that are interested just in "usual" 
notation.  Hence, it is probably better to keep the clefs separated in two 
different sections.

As a side note, when I added the special fermatas, I thought they were 
in some sense "standard" contemporary notation, because I had seen them 
in some scores.  However, it turned out that these scores were published 
by a single famous publisher, but I never saw these fermatas in any score 
of a different publisher.  In this sense, I meanwhile somewhat regret that 
I added these symbols without having checked carefully enough for these 
symbols having been truely accepted as a standard across 
publishers/composers.

Greetings,
Juergen

> I can't remember if I 
> wrote it, or if this is an old section left over from a long time ago when 
> those fermatas weren't in the general articulation file.  I can't find any 
> recent mention of this in the Changelog.
>
> I'd like to delete it; any objections?
> - Graham
>
>
>
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