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? 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. 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. 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 ... ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
