[question mark in time signature]
> On second thought, I realize that this symbol is far below the
popularity threshold for SMuFL glyphs. (It's from a few scores
self-published by a composer who isn't terribly famous.) Sorry for the
noise.<
This highlights a problem: there is no clear dividing line between what is
music notation and what is not.
Composers are an awkward bunch and are often more than happy to write things
down which no-one else has done; sometimes they catch on, and become a
firmly established part of the canon, and sometimes they don't. As you
say, a question mark in the time signature probably hasn't. Other things
(like 'Sacred Harp' shape note notation) have been around for a while and
are established within a community, but are not mainstream music notation.
Other things (like G#7b5 chord notation) are definitely mainstream, but
still not part of 'classical' notation. Yet other things belong to older
music systems (eg neumes) and would not be used in conjunction with
now-standard notation. Some other older notation (eg the stylised letters
used to indicate frets in lute tablature - BTW does SMuFL have those?) might
just be used in conjunction with standard notation.
In the current requests for this that or the the other symbol to be
included, I can see that at the most general level SMuFL might want to
assign a code point to every possible musical symbol, and whilst technically
impossible (what does 'every possible symbol' mean?) it might almost be
achieved.
But presumably SMuFL is being defined in the expectation that people will
write SMuFL-compliant fonts? If an SMuFL-compliant font has to include
all the symbols, then the desire to be all-inclusive, militates against the
possibility that anyone will ever write one (after Bravura, I suppose).
Of course Unicode has more generally recognised this problem and few (no?)
fonts have characters defined at every code point. For the purposes of the
user, it is sufficient to know that a given font includes Arabic, Greek, or
Latin-Extended-A or whatever, depending on his purposes.
So (at last my question) will there be specific subsets of code points
defined, so that if a font contains the whole of a subset, it might be
officially labelled as containing symbols for "plainchant", "Sacred Harp",
"common practice period", "20th century popular music", and so on?
Dave
David Webber
Mozart Music Software
http://www.mozart.co.uk/
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