| > Does anyone have a requirement for global accidentals as described above?
| > Would anyone object if they were dropped and you got the ability to add
| > accidentals to the key signature instead ? If the answer to both of these
| > is "no", then we should adopt the key signature implementation of global
| > accidentals.
|
| I think this should be a preference settable in the application rather
| than part of ABC itself. Example of where you might want this: the
| Scots song/strathspey "Tullochgorum" is in the mixolydian mode with
| the seventh very strongly emphasized. If I was typesetting this for
| myself, I'd put that information in the key signature. But almost
| every copy of the tune notated in the last 250 years has done it the
| other way, so there has got to be a market for that option.
One of the significant uses of "funny" key signatures is the common
practice, especially in Scottish music, of writing mixolydian tunes
with an explicit natural on the 7th. This has been done as a way to
try to get across that "A has three sharps" isn't true in this case.
If you just write the correct key signature, ^f^c, a lot of musicians
will quickly figure out that the tonic is A, they "know" that A has a
^g, so they play the g's sharp and figure that the key signature must
be a typo.
The two traditional ways of trying to prevent this are to either give
in and write a ^f^c^g signature and then put a natural before every
G, or to write a signature of ^f^c=g. The former approach is ugly,
but it does usually work. The second is more elegant and usually
works, because it gets across the idea that the ^g wasn't omitted;
the natural is intentional. Of course, some musicians will treat the
natural in the signature as a typo, and some will ignore naturals
before notes because it sounds funny, but this sort of problem is
hopeless and can't be fixed at all. Sometimes people put the natural
both in the the key signature and throughout the music, but this is
not likely to persuade someone who isn't convinced by one or the
other, and is probably a wasted effort.
For that matter, I have one book that contains a version of Paddy on
the Turnpike that is written with a G major key signature, and then
every B and e is marked with a flat, and most f's are marked with a
natural. This is probably the most extreme case of musical
cluelessness that I've run across. Whoever did it had obviously
learned that the key of G is indicated by the ^f signature, but this
didn't sound right, so accidentals were added to fix all the notes
that didn't sound right. What's interesting here is that this made it
past the publisher's proofreaders.
The only real solution to these sorts of problems is education.
As for the "global accidentals" question, I'd think that having an
option to show them in either the key signature or before the notes
is generally a good idea. The most useful default would be to show
them in the key signature. But sprinkling them through the music
could be useful in some circumstances. Doing both could also come in
handy at times. If they could be shown as parenthesized accidentals,
that would be even better. There's lots of opportunity here for a
versatile music-display package.
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