People who ask me for transpositions are very frequently not the most skilled singers and are participating in musical theatre on a less sophisticated level than the discussion about this topic is being conducted.
Given this, is there a simpler way to achieve altering the double flats other than manually?
Crystal Premo [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: John Howell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Finale] Double flats Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 13:00:05 -0500
At 7:49 AM -0500 12/19/04, dhbailey wrote:d. collins wrote:
Crystal Premo écrit:
I have a client who has had me transpose The Music That Makes Me Dance up a half step, and now wants to see all of the double flats eliminated. I can understand this, but is there an easy way to achieve this?
There probably is, but then the music will we completely "wrong", unless you change _all_ the notes and put the piece it in the same key with sharps. What was the original key?
Dennis
David H. Bailey:
But then there are varying ways of being "wrong" in this situation -- there is the "wrong" of the music theory world which dictates that music must be within very narrowly defined paradigms involving scales and keys and woe to anybody who alters something just to make it easy to play.
Then there is the "wrong" of being theoretically "right" but much harder to perform, with tons of double-flats or double-sharps which many musicians, amateur AND pro, have great difficulty playing without a lot of practice.
In this case everyone is correct, and whatever Crystal does will be a compromise. But I would suggest that before making enharmonic decisions, the person making them, whether this is Crystal or her client, take into consideration the specific instrument and its fingerings. On a stringed instrument, for example, keys with many flats will be sight-read in a lower position, possibly half position, forcing the hand lower on the fingerboard. Mixing in naturals and/or sharps at random will disturb the visual look of the fingering patterns and make sightreading unnecessarily difficult, since the player will have to "translate" the accidentals mentally in real time. (Yes, better fingerings can be worked out, but I'm talking about sightreading here.) The same is true for woodwinds (especially if you get into the plethora of notes controlled by the two little fingers on clarinet), and to a lesser extent on brass instruments (which have no difficult individual fingerings, but can get into difficult fingering combinations). Pianists are used to double flats and sharps and they should be left as is. Mallet players are on their own! And nobody should score for harp without serious study of its limitations and requirements.
John
-- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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