Re: why Kieren is a \relative evangelist [was “Re: Nested transposition"]

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hi all,

>> imho the near universality of keyboard competence defines Western Music as 
>> "can be played on a piano" and has severely damaged our understanding of 
>> what music actually is. Musicians like me who can't play piano are very rare 
>> ...

As a musical theatre director, college music faculty instructor, composer, and 
performer (on multiple instruments), I can say with high confidence that you 
are mistaken: musicians who can’t play piano include at least 50% of the 
players in my pit bands, 80% of the music theatre students I teach, most of my 
young (pre-college) composition students, and a good 1/3 of the singers I 
accompany. If we qualify further with “can plunk out a linear melody on the 
piano reasonably in time, but nothing more than that”, the percentage is even 
higher.

>> And why would a copyist be able to play keyboard?
> Or not.  There's no reason for them to be mutually exclusive.

Agreed. That being said, of all the (multiple dozens of) professional copyists 
I know, I know of only one who doesn’t play keyboard at least “reasonably well” 
(perhaps coincidentally, he’s a fabulous guitarist).

> \fixed should make extremely high or low parts much easier.

It does… but it also suffers from the same cut-and-paste problem (that word 
“IMO”) as \relative.

> Probably the biggest problem I encounter with \relative is when I enter some 
> music and then extract a section of it into a variable for use somewhere else 
> and having the original shift octaves somewhere in the middle.  Then I have 
> to search for the shift and correct it.

That was the straw that broke my camel’s back so many years ago. I find it 
particularly bad if you try to compose or arrange directly in Lilypond (as 
opposed to simply transcribing or engraving-from-written-MS): write the first 
section, write the third section, then write the second section and the third 
section “becomes wrong”; fix that; try to cut-and-paste a chunk from Section 2 
into Section 3, and both the new section *and* the rest of the piece “become 
wrong”; fix that; etc. When this plays out at higher resolution, I find it 
endlessly maddening (and flow-killing).

Perhaps if list-ers had come to my rescue back then in the (wonderful!) way 
they do for newbies now, I wouldn’t have thrown \relative out entirely, and my 
view of \relative might now be more generous… Or perhaps incremental 
improvements have been made to all the related functionality (\transpose, 
\relative, quote and cue stuff, etc.) so that it’s objectively less frustrating 
for people (like me) who regularly work with massive scores (50 staves x 100s 
of measures, transposing instruments including many multi-instrumentalists, 
etc.) and reuse lots of material (parts and scores, multiple formats of output, 
cueing/quoting as well as cutting-and-pasting, etc.). Whatever the reason is, 
it seems like every time I’m working in \relative mode (usually when trying to 
help someone on the list), something comes up which reminds me why I use 
\absolute.

I’m glad that many people like \relative, and I continue to hope that nobody 
falls into the same frustrating \relative pit(s) that I did.

And thus ends my last-ever evangelistic post or response on this topic.  =)

Cheers,
Kieren.
________________________________

Kieren MacMillan, composer (he/him/his)
‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info
‣ email: kieren@kierenmacmillan.info