> > You could say the same about tablature. Obviously, it has its place. > > Even Bach wrote stuff for lute tablature. > ... > There are some lute tablatures of Bach's works for lute, namely for > BWV 995, 997, 1000. > But for some of them it's sure Bach didn't wrote the tablature > himself, for others it's quite unlikely.
FWIW tablature was a very popular notation system for lutes and viols, from late 16th to early 18th century, especially in England, France and Germany. Lute/viol tablature is actually a very good fit for the nature of the instrument because these are solo instruments with a range of 3, 4 or more octaves. Using staff notation, notating a chord spanning 3 and a half octaves would normally necessitate using 2 staves, like in keyboard music, but unlike keyboards on the lute and viol the hands are not independent of each other. So tablature is actually a great solution. There's also this substantial and sadly practically unknown repertoire for the lyra-viol, which employed some 30-odd different tunings. Using tablature allowed players to easily switch between the different tunings without thinking about fingering. If you look at music for the modern classical guitar, you'll it's notated one octave above sounding pitch, just so the music would be centred more or less on the staff, but every time there's a 6-string chord you get these enormous ladders extending above and below the staff. But then again, you don't hear any guitarists complaining... Apart from lute tablature there's of course also organ tablature, which was more or less a local north-german phenomenon, but which held at least from the 15th century through the late 17th. In organ tablature pitches are notated using letters, bearing a vague resemblance to lilypond code actually. A good portion of Buxtehude's organ music is notated in tablature, as well as some of his sacred vocal music. Parts of Bach's Orgelbüchlein are also notated in tablature. As to why the practice existed, it's not very clear but one can guess that tablature was a fast way of writing music at the keyboard - no need for drawing staves and a each note requires a single stroke, instead of drawing note heads, stems, beams etc. It is also very economical for homophonic music. Sharon -- View this message in context: http://lilypond.1069038.n5.nabble.com/simplifying-chromatic-scale-notation-tp186415p186504.html Sent from the User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
