Roman Numerals Used Among Conservatories in Japan

Dorico
#1

// Sorry to duplicate the following contents here since I have found something messed up in the comment board of the Dorico development blog. //

It occurred to me that Finale has lack of convenient support of Roman Numerals; Meanwhile, Sibelius supports Roman Numerals but still limited to the style used in North American traditional music education without support of inversions of V9 dominant chords.

I am wondering whether Dorico would offer stronger support of Roman Numerals, including the style used in Japan (EXACTLY the one used among Yuzuru Shimaoka’s tonal harmony textbooks, e.g. ISBN: 978-4276102194 and 978-4276102330).

P.S.: Note that Yuzuru Shimaoka is the president of The Society For Music Theory Of Japan. Probably it’s him who made the Japanese style of Roman Numerals. From my perspective, it’s much more efficient when demonstrating rootless dominants. You Steinberg may want to consult YAMAHA to cope with this feature request since YAMAHA is a Japanese company.

#2

I would hope that we will be able to look at alternative ways of describing harmonies textually when we tackle chord symbols; this would perhaps include not only Roman numerals but also Nashville numbers. I can’t, at this stage, promise that we will definitely support this within a specific timeframe, but support for Roman numerals is definitely in our plans.

#3

Thanks for your supportive reply. Since you mentioned Nashville Numbering system, I am wondering of something else: Do you have any interest on the numeral score like the following?:

// See this wiki image file: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AmazingGraceNumberedMusicalNotation.png

This numeral system is widely used in East Asia among people of at least the following:

  1. Christians in Taiwan;
  2. Folk soloists in Mainland China. Most of them never use traditional 5-line staves;
  3. Primary students taking music classes in most East Asian countries. 5-line staves are too hard for them to study (except those pofessional child student soloists).
    Supporting numeral score will do great help to them since they don’t have a reliable notation software of such in the previous 20 years.
#4

I believe this notation system is known as jianpu, am I correct?

I think this has more in common with solfège and other solmization systems used in Western culture – which describe melody as opposed to harmony – than with chord symbols and Roman numerals. I’m not sure that our work on chord symbols would be likely to include either solfège or jianpu.

#5

Probably the better solution is to make a standalone software to read the MusicXML and convert its contents to Jianpu. In such case, it may beyond what you (Dorico team) are authorized to do; probably the marketing team should be involved considering this feature request to decide whether it should be a standalone product or just a feature inside Dorico.

P.S.: The name “Jianpu” is only used in Chinese language, but this numeral notation system is also used in Japan and Korea since it is friendly to those people who have less music education. We never use this when I was taking solfege courses in the University of Lethbridge (we were meant to train ourselves to get used to the 5-line stave system), but I use this system when taking memos (e.g. Listening tests or some sudden melody came to my mind).