I’ve recently started attending a trad music class and some of the people there use ‘whistle notation’, a form of ABC but with enough varients from the ‘standard’ that I find it verry difficult to desiphor. In perticular it gives only notes with no indication of key, uses only caps and '/, to denote octaves. I’ve also descovered that mary bergin uses it in her tutor books (someone at the class uses them).
How common is this notation? I find it strange to have ran into it now when I’ve never seen it used/mentioned online.
It’s a way of writing tunes that’s been in use as an aide memoire among Irish musicians for donkey’s years and pre-dates the ABC notation that was developed for use on the internet, with appropriate software to translate it into staff notation. It’s not whistle specific and very common in Ireland.
It’s called ABC notation and the idea is you write down the names of the notes so you can give it to a seven year old learner to help them practice their tune at home without the need for the internet or ‘resources’. It’s simple, all you need to know is the names of the notes and where to find them on your instrument. EG A = A A’= second A
E’F’E’ E’D’B ABA E-F GBG E-F GAB D’ (a ‘half moon’ / ‘nail clipping’ symbol goes over the notes that get a roll/crann, which I don’t have handy on the keyboard)
It’s like code for a secret society. You gotta know the right handshake.
Musicians have always had to have quick ways of capturing a tune for later reference. My father was a jazz player. He and his compadres had their own method of brief notation. It used standard staff notation for the melody but it was really sparse stuff. I think that was the origins of what we now call “fake books”. Nowadays we have things like digital audio recorders and smartphones that can capture a tune spectacularly well. The recording can later be used to write out notation in whatever format works for the individual player.
Just to add a little to what Peter has already provided, ABC in its myriad forms has been around longer than I have been playing (in my seventh decade now). I first ran into ABC notation in the early 1960’s or there about. Many folk musicians would carry notebooks full of songs and tunes as collecting them was part of the tradition. Brevity was part of the process. Songs, when presented, had to be captured quickly since others would follow in short order. Chords were easy enough to add to a lyric sheet but capturing the melody was a bit more difficult. Yes, some players were able to write down the dots. But ABC was quick and did not require a conservatory education to use or make sense of later on. As Peter points out, it only had to jog the memory of the melody.
So, there were no standards for the practice of jotting down ABC’s back then. It only had to make sense to the one jotting down the notes. Exchanging tunes could present some issues. But since most players would merely jot down there own versions from what another played it was not a big deal. No Internet. No ABC readers/players existed.
A lot of personal variation still exists with ABC practitioners today. Old habits can be hard to break.
Now we have the Internet. We have online repositories of tunes. We have ABC players and editors. So standardization of the ABC format makes sense now. If you want to bone up on the standard form you might start here: http://abcnotation.com/
It’s like code for a secret society. You gotta know the right handshake.
In all fairness, the subject has been touched upon here many times before. I remember posting scans of my son’s whistle classes here probably a decade ago.
The key to the system is simplicity. Feadoggie is right when he says the notation can take on slightly different forms, it’s not a standardised thing, it’s an informal and quick way of jotting down a tune. A degree of detail can be inserted.
FWIW, when teaching I always give my pupils the option of getting the tune in staff notation or ABC after their class. I have yet to get a request for staff notation.
Yep, exactly why Walshaw designed his ABC to be ASCII keyboard friendly.
Having taught internet ABC to a few friends, I’ve found the capitalization seems to confuse people. But it’s simple: don’t think “upper” case (high) and “lower” case (low). Think: the BIG letters are heavy and sink to the bottom (1st octave). And the SMALL letters are light and rise to the top (2nd octave). The rest is icing.
Yep, exactly why Walshaw designed his ABC to be ASCII keyboard friendly.
Obviously. I have yet to find anyone who would use the squiggle of internet ABC (let’s called it that for now to distinguish the two) in writing (or ‘real life’ if you like) to indicate rolls. I have though, a few times, seen people gasp on the internet about those of us who still follow the method designed by Breandán Breathnach for use in his Ceol Rinnce na hEirreann. Breandán wrote a little piece on various notation systems used by Irish musicians during the eighties, it can be found in the collection of his writings ‘The Man and his Music’.
Usually the written version is a bit loose with the capitalisation, ’ indicating the higher octave. It’s not set in stone though. If it does the job, it’s fine. As I said before, it’s not rocket-surgery.
It’s similar to what happened around the same time with the transliteration of languages that use non-Latin characters (Greek, Russian, Arabic, etc.), or that use lots of diacritical markings (Czech, Polish, etc.). Systems for writing these in Latin chars have been around forever, and you could devise whatever ink marks and squiggles you wanted. But faced with keyboards and the 7-bit ASCII character set as the lowest common denominator, users themselves (the language speakers) improvised.
IIRC, Walshaw also started by scribbling tunes on pub napkins. It was his insight into the keyboard bit which made the difference.
IIRC, Walshaw also started by scribbling tunes on pub napkins. It was his insight into the keyboard bit which made the difference.
I do wonder sometimes if the need for a ‘lightweight’ notation, one of the driving forces in the development of ABC, has been overtaken by the bandwith that is now generally available for internet users. Most of us can now send a PDF of a collection of tunes in staff notation without much of a problem (and I say that in the knowledge that West Clare broadband would not be allowed the name ‘broadband’ anywhere else, still it beats the dial-up that went before), a luxury not available at the time.
As I said earlier, many of us have digital audio recording studios in our pockets these days. Capturing a tune, saving it or sending it on to someone else is a snap nowadays. There is no longer an immediate need to write down a tune.
I still think a lightweight form of notation is necessary and useful personally. If only as a form of jogging the old memory. My mind isn’t the steel trap it once was. I know a lot of musicians who still need a bar or two of a melody to get them going. OK. I do play with a bunch of older folks mostly these days. ABC’s are a help to those of us in that situation, as they always have been.
But then again I don’t have a smartphone with a tunepal or some such app on it with which to instantly call up the full notation. So maybe you are right (as far as the rest of the world goes).
I still think a lightweight form of notation is necessary and useful personally. If only as a form of jogging the old memory
I agree with that, but was specifically thinking of the ‘internet’ ABC and the reasons behind the development. Not the scribbles floating around the house or the notations used for teaching etc. Or even ringbinders and manuscript books filled with staff notation.
What I have enjoyed while learning the very basics of ABCnotation is now I can read both, but, I’m concentrating on ear learning. People I practice with come from various approaches to their music, while most people just learn by ear, some people use staff notation and other people use ABCnotation. What I like to do for the few hard copy printed tunes I’m learning is to provide both approaches to accommodate as many people as possible when sharing tunes. I don’t have all that fancy smartphone/apps stuff so miss that opportunity. Here’s what I like (especially C&F) as I can see and read both. Playing it properly is another matter.
It’s a good question. I think you need to separate production and consumption.
On the consumption side it’s easy enough to pass around standard notation nowadays as PDFs or whatever.
But on the production side … With the popular music typesetting packages in common use - Allegro, Sibelius, etc. - I find the proprietary graphical user interfaces awkward at best. Standard notation is still best suited to pen and staff paper.
To me, the paradigm of a markup language and then rendering to dots is more elegant for machine use. No fancy interface needed, just a basic text editor like Notepad or vi. Type it out, mark it up, feed it to the rendering software. It’s the old WordStar / (La)TeX model applied to music. And there’s a reason that TeX-based typesetting is still preferred by many high quality document producers.
For the casual music consumer, distribute the dots output. Or distribute the ABC source and let the user re-edit it and render it however s/he wants to - paper size, orientation, layout, markings, etc.
In other words, I think the strength of a compact notation like ABC goes beyond the advantage of reduced bandwidth.
Plus, on a text forum like the Chiffboard, I can easily type out a simple tune or snippet in a minute or two inside a normal post. If I had to attach PDFs or graphics or proprietary files, I probably just wouldn’t do it. Laziness counts.
That detail was a blessing for me. I had to see the ABC notation applied to staff notation. I was wasting so much time looking up the ABC symbols in the charts, one by one, which didn’t show what it looked like on a staff notation. So thank you, and Arbo for this gem.
This is my opinion also, typing in notes is and always will be faster than any kind of ‘drag and drop’ type interface - I’m a vim user and not a fan of ‘mouse-centric’ UI’s generally as they tend to be painfully inefficient and slow. I feel the same regarding document processing, though Tex really shows it’s age. Considering I vertually never produce anything for print, HTML/css is what I lean towards.
And here I thought I just being clever when, maybe 15 or 20 years ago, I “invented” a way to try and notate stray bits of melody running in my mind, for when I didn’t have a keyboard or music paper handy.
Seriously, ABC-like notation systems are quire old indeed. I know, for example, Shaker tune writers were using several different letter notation systems back in the early 19th century. Possibly before then. Some used letters written on a standard staff, some used different fonts for different note lengths. Of course, solfa notation is also similarly old.
But the system is by far older than even the Shakers. Set your time machines back to good old Mesopotamia and crack your hymnal open to “Old No. 6”, we see they were using, not ABC, but 123 for their notation. There’s a neat article on “Old No. 6”, the ancient Hurrian hymn to Nikkal, written thousands of years ago in some kind of numeric notation. If we’re puzzling over ABC now, and what “A” vs “a” mean, imagine trying to sort out that old Hurrian notation scheme!
Apart from collecting whistles, I also collect old tune books. Have yet to find one written in ABC-like notation, though. All of them thus far have been in standard dots. Mind you, some of the tunes are pretty darn messy and clearly written out in haste! Others were very nicely written out, obviously by professional / working musicians. Probably gig books. Still others were left unfinished / uncopied out. Continuing with that old tradition of collecting tunes into books, I keep a set of hand written tunes books of my own. I don’t do well at all with going by ear – though I’ve managed to write out maybe a half dozen tunes I like that way – but if I find something I like in another collection, I just dutifully copy it into my own books!
Technically, Ugarit wasn’t Mesopotamian, though the notation may be Akkadian. But I digress.
Pah! I happen to know that hymns No. 1-5 were far, far better. By the time No. 6 came out, the whole “Prayer to Nikkal” genre was pretty much played out, and it never even made the Top Ten. Oh sure, Oldies shows kept it going for a while as a favorite among lyre shredders. But once the megahit “Ba’al Is My BFF” hit #1 on the charts, old No. 6 was barely worth the clay it’s written on. No wonder it’s in such bad shape now.
