I am starting to think there are two general classes of musicians, the functionalists, and the aestheticists. For the first group, all the matters is the sound output, and the notated input should be considered purely a means to that end, conveyed with the most efficiency, and essentially irrelevant. The second group cares about the visual appearance of the texts they are working with, the graphic expression, the look and feel, and all the extra-musical clues that notational gestures give, whether definitely prescriptive or merely evocative. I suspect these groupings may be mutually exclusive!
As an example, the New Complexity school composer I engrave scores for insists on extremely long elongated stems, very exaggerated, very International Gothic style. These add precisely nothing to the music, to the legibility, or to anything except a very personal graphic look and style. Since he insists on this being preserved as a hallmark of his work, I am delighted that lilypond provides a way to set the stem lengths. It’s useless, but looks great, and conveys a certain mood. Clearly he and I are both aestheticists. Andrew
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