>|| What the accidentals =3D, ^, _ mean? Are they "absolute" (e g "_e" means >|| "e flat") or are they in relation to the key (e g "=3De" means "e flat" >|| in Bb major)? >| They're absolute, just as in conventional music notation. > Just out of curiosity, are there any musical traditions/styles that > use a relative (or cumulative) approach? I've never seen any, but > that doesn't mean they don't exist.
It's quite common in early music for a sharp-turned-45-degrees sign to mean either a sharp or a naturalization of a flat. > This seems somewhat related to the old question of the persistence of > accidentals. Current conventional practice is that accidentals last > to the next bar line, but there are several musical styles that use > the "only the one note" rule. This is true for European music before > 1600 or so, and also for much modern music (especially atonal). Looking up the first two atonal scores that came to hand, neither of them do this. Robert Crawford's Variations for Recorder and Piano uses the ordinary to-the-next-barline rule, and Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra uses a third rule, "every note gets an accidental on its first occurrence in a bar, and that accidental stays in force until there is a change in pitch" (there are a lot of repeated notes in the score). I think Webern did the same, but can't find a score at the moment. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
