Jack Campin writes: | > Consider the D-Ahavoh Rabboh mode, common in Klezmer. [...] | | You're missing the point. John was talking about the difference | between writing such scales as an explicit key signature at the | start (as is usually done these days for Turkish music) and | taking some major or minor key signature as the base and then | writing an accidental beside every note that deviates from it. | We seem to be agreed that the latter is not generally a good | idea; I was pointing out occasions when it has in fact been done | in print.
Exactly right. When the big Klezmer revival started back in the 70's and 80's, published music usually did shoehorn the tunes into classical scales, with lots of accidentals. This was widely considered silly. Would you write A-major tunes in G, and add accidentals on all the C's and G's? Of course not; you'd write a key signature that shows the correct scale, and write accidentals on notes outside that scale (including brief excursions into other keys). Most collections if Irish and Scottish music have long since gotten away from writing dorian and mixolydian tunes in classical major/minor keys with accidentals to correct the scale. More recent Klezmer collections have gone to writing the correct key signatures for tunes, and they are often not classical signatures. A couple of years ago, Mel Bay put out a nice Klezmer collection that does this. There is a certain amount of judgement needed here. Klezmer music uses at least 5 distinct scales routinely, and the style involves a lot of switching between closely-related keys and scales. This is generally true of a lot of the music of eastern Europe. So you find yourself thinking "Hmmm ... This tune seems to start in D freygish, but then it clearly cadences on G minor. Then back to Df, but the third part goes into Bb major for several bars, and then it moves to C minor, hangs around there a while, and then ends on a D major chord." So you pick some reasonable compromise key, maybe the starting or ending key, and use accidentals. And everyone who thinks they know the music will explain to you why you should have picked a different signature for that tune. Maybe they're right. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
