Wagner Tubas on the Workbench

Back in Sweden at the workbench with the instrument library. I'm finding it a little difficult to concentrate on architectural work this week. So I'm doing practical things instead.

The Instrument Library mechanism is done: the editors, the persistence, the validation, the conflict-free multi-user layer. Multiple users can edit the same library concurrently without colliding.

The single-user case (engravers working on their own computer, the normal case) is now a special case of a collaboration group whose size happens to be exactly 1. No branch in the code. No fallback. No 'offline mode'. No special case. Same logic, same invariants, same code paths, same tests, for a group size of 1 as for a group size of 30. This is the first subsystem in which that collapse is visible end-to-end, and therefore the first concrete evidence that the collaboration machinery underneath Ooloi works the way it was designed to.

So the road map looks like this. The next major thing is the Piece Window: the view in which scores are managed, and the central surface of the whole application. It's no longer a large task. Almost everything it needs already exists: drag and drop, field editors, validation machinery, persistence, undo. All of it was built for the Instrument Library, and all of it generalises directly. The Piece Window is, in effect, a new arrangement of parts that are already on the shelf.

Colour choices

Which is precisely why I'm tidying the workshop before I start on it. Meaning: field validation for every editor, properly factored, so I never have to think about 'did I validate this one yet?' again. Splash window timing. Colour schemes. UI principles. None of it is glamorous, but all of it is important because the UI is how Ooloi will be perceived. My aim throughout has been that the program should disappear as much as possible, so the user is in charge and can work undisturbed by technical things. There has to be a certain kind of quiet to what the end user sees.

And, in parallel whilst adding those bits of wiring, I'm filling the Instrument Library with real instruments.

The quiet chaos that is Wagner tubas, for example. Every composer who has written for them labelled them by key, from Wagner himself onwards. The tenor is always in B♭; the bass is always in F. So the library needs 'Tenor Wagner Tuba in B♭' and 'Bass Wagner Tuba in F', in four languages.

Historical notation, again, turns out to deserve a mention. Modern scores write Wagner tubas in treble clef, transposing a perfect fifth below written, the same as Horn in F, which lets horn players switch between horn and Wagner tuba parts without any mental recalibration. But Bruckner's symphonies put the tenor in B♭ basso sounding a major ninth below written and the bass in F sounding a perfect twelfth below, in bass clef; Strauss keeps the same major-ninth/perfect-twelfth transpositions but writes them in treble clef. Neither convention is wrong. Both are alive in the literature, so Ooloi provides both. This isn't a new principle. Ooloi already does the same for old horn notation, which still turns up in any nineteenth-century orchestral part you open; and for the bass and contrabass clarinet variants, which notate differently in the French and German traditions.

Mostly, though, this is a procession of small, specific questions. How do the Italians abbreviate Tuba wagneriana bassa? How do the French abbreviate le Grand Highland Bagpipe, given that no French orchestra has ever scored for one?

It's a quieter kind of work than architecture. Suits me well this week.

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"Hojotohorns" (though they aren't horns by any means)