Support lower case letters for chord names

• Sep 26, 2010 - 23:35
Type
Functional
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Status
closed
Project
MuseScore

Requested at http://musescore.org/en/node/6405 and on Facebook.

The former because lowercase chord name represent a minor chord and the latter because lower case chord names are used for accordion sheet music: the major chords, next to the fundamental basses: these are denoted by just the chord name, or with a suffix `maj' or `M': e.g. `c', or `cM', or `cmaj'

Comments

• Jun 23, 2013 - 05:02

As explained [[http://musescore.org/en/node/21540#comment-81444|here}, I have this mostly implemented. In Style / General / Chordname, there will be a checkbox for "Lower case minor chords". Selecting that will allow you to type "c" and have it display that way and be understood as a C minor chord. Also, "Cm" and other variants will automatically render lower case.

As mentioned in the aforementioned thread, I'm still trying to get feedback on how bass notes should be rendered in this style. If you have a D minor chord in first inversion - so the bass note is F - would you expect to see "dm/F" or "dm/f"? Can anyone show me published examples using this style?

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• Jun 24, 2013 - 01:18

Marc: The one book I have that uses this notation is a hymnal published in 1981, Hymns of the Saints. It doesn't print any inversions, and minor chords are written without the suffix. The other place I encounter this style of notation was in music theory textbooks. Attached is are a couple pages from Ralph Turek's The Elements of Music.

I had a few theory teachers that used this style of notation. It followed the same conventions as functional harmony notation. The only difference was it used letters instead of roman numerals. For inversions my teachers would use the functional harmony conventions, so first inversion would a superscript six: "d6". 2nd inversion would be 6/4 (the six and the four stacked on top of each other, see attached). For the numbers for inversions of seventh chords see: Figured bass notation . To be honest this inversion notation is rarely used outside of the class room, since it severely limits who could read the published score.

Attachment Size
lowercase chord names.pdf 73.17 KB

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• Jun 24, 2013 - 05:26

Thanks, that matches my experience as well. Theory books tend to use it because it matches Roman numeral notation, and they borrow the inversion symbols from Roman numerals as well. But finding real world examples (outside textnooks) is tougher.

Since I'm otherwise done with the implementation, I went ahead and submitted a pull request, with things working as described above (and calling the do-re-mi option "Solfeggio" rather than "Italian"). That doesn't mean I can't change the details later if new information comes in, of course.

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