Hi Craig,
Am 08.10.22 um 14:44 schrieb Craig Bakalian:
Thank you for the solution. You are a generous person!
You're welcome. Actually, this is something that I've wanted to do for
quite some time now (and it's a comparatively simple task, once you
have got accustomed to Scheme, Contexts and Engravers in LilyPond).
All is great with the code, with one exception; dorian is re as the
resting tone, do does not become the resting tone in d dorian. So,
the tonic in dorian is re,fa,la. The tonic in mixolydian is
mi,so,ti. And, I am not apologizing here, I am a pretty well
respected music teacher in the US, European and Asian fixed do is
ignorant. Just an aside comment, your code is not creating fixed do.
Solfege is for students to learn the syntax of music; tonic -
dominant - subdominant relationships, with a movable resting tone
within each key or keyality. So, you can have an e based dorian
coupled into d major. I think Arnold Schoenberg was pretty strong
on this issue.
Yes, I know. (But I suspect you meant to say the mixolydian tonic is
so,ti,re, while mi,so,ti is Phrygian?)
The problem is that there's really a large number of different
"solfege" methods, some being considered as "natural" in a couple of
countries or by a certain school of theoreticians, and in fact I have
to deal with the issue of finding a common ground for students from
many different backgrounds quite often, being a theory teacher at a
major European music university with a very international student
base. For example, I know
- do as tonic in major, la in minor (and sometimes re in Dorian etc.
in contexts where these modes are important)
- lowering notes by "ti->ta", "mi->ma", "la->lo"
- lowering notes by "ti->te", "mi->me", "la->le"
- lowering notes by "ti->tu", "mi->mu", "la->lu"
- do as tonic in every mode (so Dorian becomes, for instance,
do-re-mu-fa-so-la-tu-do)
- minor using do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti (yes indeed! I have an older German
aural training textbook that does this)
and so on, and that's not even talking about the completely different
(fixed do) system used, for instance, in France, Italy, Spain, Russia,
Romania, China, other movable tonic systems (ja le mi ni ro su wa ja),
strange beasts like the one developed by Eitz, and so on.
I long ago stopped considering one of these to be the "correct" one.
Of course it's true that "movable do" systems lead to a quite
different way of thinking about pitch and tonality than "fixed do"
systems do, and actually I think I have good reasons to emphasise
"movable tonic" systems in my teaching - so we agree here.
(And to give another example complicating things further: Jazz
musicians often seem to be using a movable do system that is not
rooted in the current tonality, but in the current chord; and in doing
so, they set "do = root of the current chord". This seems to be
helpful for improvising in a certain Chord-related mode in chord scale
theory. And in the cases I have seen, they use "-e" for lowering steps
chromatically. - If I'm not mistaken, that's the style taught at
Berklee College, for instance.)
To the point, and it is resolvable by making everything \key "anykey"
\major, but, how would we change the code to make \dorian re based,
\lydian fa based?
I think the proper approach to doing this would be to introduce a new
context property: We already have "tonic", but we should also have a
"solfeggio-do" giving the pitch of the current do. A possible syntax
would be:
\key e \dorian
\setDo d
(and we could also modify \key to do the \setDo step automatically).
The problem is that internally, \dorian and \lydian are nothing but a
bunch of "alterations":
#(display dorian)
returns
((0 . 0) (1 . 0) (2 . -1/2) (3 . 0) (4 . 0) (5 . 0) (6 . -1/2))
which just means "third and seventh steps are lowered with respect to
the major scale". From this, it's not completely trivial to
automatically find the "do" in the system you prefer, so probably the
proper route would be to enrich the information encapsuled in the
"dorian" variable. This would actually be a change that might be
incorporated into LilyPond proper.
I'm happy to play around with this if you - as I would understand
perfectly well - are not convinced of simply writing "\key d \major"
instead of "\key e \dorian" in order to get the syllables the way you
want them to be.
Lukas