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

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Mar 19, 2021 at 12:16:49PM -0400, Kieren MacMillan wrote:
[...]
> > 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).
[...]

It's somewhat mitigated by inserting octave checks every so often (say,
at the start of every section), so that when it does go wrong, there's a
warning, and the problem only propagates up to the next octave check
rather than the rest of the piece.  That's what I do, anyway -- I also
compose directly in Lilypond. Octave checks are also the first warnings
that come up, so my usual practice is to interrupt Lilypond as soon as I
see an octave check failure, fix it, and repeat until no more warnings
come up.

Of course, I know your stance has been very clear all these years, so
I'm not going to try to convince you.  :-)  But just wanted to say that
there *are* ways to mitigate the problem, and that I find \relative
still extremely useful in tonal music.


T

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