Re: Turkish makam

[Luca Fascione]

Right, I see. Thanks for explaining Adam, this is obviously a world I have
not seen until now,
and a very interesting new way of thinking about music and its written form.

To give you a better sense of where I was coming from, imagine that a
person sits down to write a piece,
this person having a need for one of the makams that are not already in
turkish-makam.ly (for the sake of argument, let's say this is "neva")
Assuming that this particular makam is one of the more uncommon ones,
wouldn't it be simpler to just have something like

neva = #(define-makam g a bfc c d e fb)

and then later in the file

\key g \neva

(I do realize the notes and key are the wrong ones, of course, I just
copied your example for rast here just so I had something concrete to type
down)

I guess I'm thinking: if it's the case that only ever a few files could
exist in these more rare forms,
it seems that there wouldn't be much value in having them in the global
file, including the fact that
for the person needing to engrave such a piece they'd need to either alter
the distribution or wait for
an update before they can proceed. Or is my thinking missing some aspect
here?

I'm saying this because this is a common pattern in software engineering:
providing common
constructs in libraries, and augment this with enough extension mechanisms
so that uncommon
things can be achieved, through a potentially less convenient route.

L

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 5:07 AM Adam Good <goodadamgood@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 4:30 AM Luca Fascione <l.fascione@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> All this being said, I just read there are hundreds of makams, which
>> makes me wonder whether it
>> wouldn't be more effective to provide a simple method to indicate the
>> makam of a piece at the start
>> of the score, for all but the most common N ones (maybe N could be
>> somewhere between 50 and 100?).
>>
>
> Very creative speculating on your part! However, it's really very very
> simple and nothing needs to happen here. For starters, makams are not
> scales or too akin to what we think of as modes in "western music", they're
> like melodic journeys that have a beginning note or area and always always
> always have a finalis or ending note that never deviates. This journey is
> called "seyir" which could translate to "path". Though they are not simply
> scales, one can strip a makam down to its most basic form and notate a
> simple 7 note scale and since we may need accidentals, we really like to
> use a key signature.
>
> Let's take the makam Rast:
>
> g a bfc c d e fb
>
> the pitch g just happens to be the finalis...every song or instrumental
> composition will have a melody that must end on that pitch. And the
> accidentals say "b one koma flat" and "f four koma sharp" so I'll add those
> in my key signature which, using turkish-makam.ly
>
> \key g \rast
>
> That's it. At the top of the score in the titling I would write the makam
> name and the form of the composition:
>
> Rast Şarkı
> or
> Rast Peşrevi
>
> etc.
>
> The most common makams number around 60+ then they start to get more rare.
> But they exist and I'd defined them in turkish-makam.ly
>
> I hope that makes sense and gives something of an idea. I sure do
> appreciate the interest!!
>
> Adam
>


-- 
Luca Fascione