Re: New feature: automatically invert chords or drop/rise chord notes (issue 365840043 by address@hidden)

[Lukas-Fabian Moser]

> > This statement surprises me. I always thought of 'drop n' (with 'drop 2'
> > being the most common one) as a means to transform closed-harmony
> > _upper_ voices into open harmony _upper_ voices, without changing the
> > bass at all.
> [...]
>
> Much like continued bass, what we’re dealing with here is the "right
> hand" positions, which most certainly does not affect the bass line,
> except in jazz music it will typically be played by the _left_ hand
> (or with both hands) whilst the actual bass line (often heavily
> anchored in root notes, much more so than in baroque music) is left to
> the bass player. In this regard, what I referred to as "changing the
> bass note" would actually be better phrased as "changing the lowest
> note played by the guy in charge of chords, regardless of what the
> global bass note will be". At least, that’s my understanding of how
> jazz music is conceptualized, which YMMV with.

Yep, I think we can absolutely agree on that. (This reminds me of the 
famous virtual sing-post that some teachers like to attach to everything 
below c on the piano: "Keep off here - there's a bass player around!") I 
just wanted to point out that IMO it's not helpful to call the lowest 
sounding pitch played by one specific non-bass instrument (i.e. the 
piano) the "bass" note.

> BTW, there’s no proper notion of inversions as such in jazz music
> (AFAICT); so the purpose of an \invertChords function here is left to
> our appreciation, with the minimal requirement being that the lowest
> note of the chord changes each time -- but traditionally, I think the
> lowest note of the previous inversion *should* become the highest note
> of the next inversion (and reciprocally when proceeding in reverse).
> If that means moving said note by two octaves instead of just one,
> then so be it (IMO).

Agreed - I just might add that, IMHO, as I tried to point out, the 
concept of chord positions arising "by inversion" is not that helpful in 
a classical context, either.

By this, I do not mean that a 6-chord shouldn't be derived from a 
root-position chord containing the same pitch classes (even if that 
notion came up comparatively late in the history of music theory - 
probably as late as Rameau). Rather, even if one considers <e, c g c'> 
as being derived from an abstract c major chord, which of course is 
absolutely adequate in most situations[1] at least for everything from 
Baroque and later ages, I do not think that one should think of it as 
having arisen from some actual chord voicing by a procedure like 
"inversion".

Lukas

[1] More specifically, situations where chords do not arise by 
contrapuntal voice-leading patterns.