Re: Beam positions and time signature spacing

[Peter Bjuhr]

On 11/11/2013 12:53 PM, Gilberto Agostinho wrote:
> Although I agree with you that these things are important, there are certain
> things that could make problems clearer and are not used. Ex: it is not
> standard to write a little "8" under the bass clef when dealing with
> Contrabass in a non-transposed orchestral score (where tranposing
> instruments, such as clarinets and horns, are written in C, but octave
> transposing instruments, such as contrabass or piccolo flute stay with their
> registers changed). This is my point here: standards. Even if something is
> prettier, simpler, nicer, it still shouldn't matter if there is a rule or
> standard behind. And I think that LilyPond should output things as close as
> possible to these standards, and then let the users who want to change
> things use \tweaks and \overrides.
>
>
> My suggestion would be to follow a set of rules (if they exist), as I
> explained above. Gould seems to be a good choice, but of course it would be
> possible to have other sources. I just don't believe that we should be doing
> these things "by the eye", "because it looks balanced", etc.

Hi again Gilberto,

I have some problems interpreting what the conclusions from your 
reasoning would be and what it would imply for LilyPond. It would be 
rewarding for me and perhaps for yourself if you could expand a little 
on these lines of thought.

If we're all to follow a set of rules there must be a very good reason 
for them for otherwise people will follow their own subjective ideas and 
desires. That would apply to legislation as well as other general rules. 
If you're a smaller group the rules could be somewhat more arbitrary 
because you could convince people to follow them only to become/stay 
part of the group.

Gould's reason (even promise) is that if we follow her rules and 
recommendation the musicians would do a better job at interpreting the 
score and hence we have better music.

It's also important to remember that the general rules only set the 
boundaries for our possibilities; we don't spend all our energy just 
avoiding breaking any laws. We still have to make tons of decisions 
where the laws can't guide us. We can of course invent some extra rules 
to make the decisions easier but that would be more on a personal or 
group level. We wouldn't request that all where to follow these rules.

Applied to music notation I'd like to think that that was what David was 
referring to when he wrote:

> LilyPond should output things as best as possible within
> the framework of notation elements.

If we accept Gould as the standard which to follow and if we believe in 
her promise that musicians will give a better performance, we still have 
a lot of decisions to make that Gould doesn't settle for us because it 
isn't her job. But every publishing house can have their own standards 
and set of rules expanding on the common standard for music notation. 
And every individual composer and engraver can have their.

Best
Peter