In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, John Chambers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes >Arent Storm writes: >| From: "I. Oppenheim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >| >| > They are non standard in Western music, but you will >| > find something like [K:D _b _e ^f] often in e.g. >| > Klezmer (Ahavoh Rabboh) or Arabic music (Maqam Hedjaz). >| >| My first thing will always be to remove any non standard >| explicit accidentals, replacing them with inline accidentals >| and inform the player textwise that he/she is playing an unusual >| mode/key. Anyway lots of klezmer tunes change mode/key >| every few bars so the need for non-classical is rather limited IMO. >| The mode/key/accidental stuff is way too complicated for the >| average folk player (in the Netherlands anyway - wer'e not >| so smart you know ;-) > >The best comparison I've seen is: Suppose you were to find >a piece of music written with two sharps (^f^c), and as you >played it, you realized that every G had a sharp added, and >it really was in A major. You'd probably be annoyed, right?
Not particularly. Many editions of Bach have that, we classical musicians are quite used to it. > >Now, you can't really claim that the music is "wrong", >because all the notes are right. But there's something >wrong with that key signature. > >The reason it's wrong is that what a key signature really >should do is tell you the accidentals that you need to get >the basic scale, and then accidentals are added to notes >that are outside the scale. If something is in A major, you >really should have ^g in the signature, because that's the >normal note in the scale. Again, not really. Horn parts in orchestral music never have any key signature, the accidentals are all written in as they occur. > >This is the fundamental argument for non-classical key >signatures. A tune in D hejaz (or freygish or Ahavoh Rabboh >or whatever) is not G minor, and the F sharps are not >altered notes. The basic scale really goes D _E ^F G A _B c >d, and so those are the notes that the key signature should >give as the starting point. Then notes outside that scale >should have accidentals. The notion of "tonic" is what I think you are referring to, and that is something that comes out of the actual music as heard, not the notation. However I concede it's a good thing to have in software which searches the K: field for tonics. > >Key changes are a confounding issue in any case. In our >original piece in A major, we might well have a few >sections that are in D major or B minor. We could write in >key changes, but for short passages, that's silly. So we >use accidentals for transient key changes, and change the >signature only if a long section is in a different key. > >The same would probably apply in any musical style. In the >case of klezmer music, there's a problem that at least four >different scales are in routine use, and key or scale >changes are quite frequent. In that case, the common >approach would be to throw up your hands at the mess (no >matter how nice a tune it is), and just pick a simple key >signature. It's the least messy solution. > >When I went through my klezmer stuff and "declassicalized" >the key signatures, I found that I only wanted a "funny" >key signature in about 1/3 of the tunes. The rest were >either in a classical mode (major, minor, mixolydian), or >were sufficiently mixed-mode that it didn't matter. > >But for tunes that really are in a non-classical scale, it >can be a lot easier to read the music if the key signature >doesn't lie to you. Once you get used to such scales, of >course. > >(And I doubt that the Dutch are any stupider than the rest >of us. There are known klezmer musicians in NL ... ;-) > So what point are you making about the abc standard? I got a bit lost in that above :-) Bernard Hill Braeburn Software Author of Music Publisher system Music Software written by musicians for musicians http://www.braeburn.co.uk Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
