I am going to disagree with the list. If I have a piece of music in A Minor mode, I would use no sharps or flats, not 3 sharps and then lower every F, C, and G. If your performers do a simple analysis of your piece and realize that it is in A Lydian mode, then the four sharps are justified. Give them the theoretically correct key. I wouldn't count out the intelligence of your performers... they are musicians, after all.
Douglas Brown Adjunct Professor, School of Music Wayland Baptist University So I am curious what this list thinks. You are writing a piece in A lydian mode. Do you use four sharps in the key sig or do you use three sharps and show the raised fourth as a chromatic alteration throughout the piece? I recently encountered this situation in some contemporary church music. I am a horn player, so key sigs are not my strong suit, but showing 4 sharps for a piece in A lydian drove me crazy (and this piece was lydian throughout, so the problem manifested over and over in other keys as well.) There was one solo where I played g-natural until the after the final run-through before I noticed the wrong note and corrected it for the performance. (The conductor was gonna let it go!) Maybe four sharps makes sense in some contexts (jazz? early music?) but it felt really wrong in contemporary church music, esp. consider the minimal rehearsal time such music gets. Yikes I just looked at Elaine Gould, and she allows any arbitrary key signature. I hope I never have to face that, and in any case would end up penciling every one of them in. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
