Laurie Griffiths writes:
| OK - I'm being thick. (Being drunk accounts for a little, but I didn't
| understand it when i was sober either!
| John quoted these examples and I either don't understand them
| or I don't recognise them. Please help.
|
| > K:^G Just a ^G as the key signature, no tonic given.
| No problem
|
| > K:_f_B_e Balkan and Middle-Eastern musicians will recognize this
| So this has all Es Bs and Fs flatted. I've seen B flat, E flat and F SHARP
| which is and altered Dorian (tonic is C) or Phrygian (tonic is D) scale
| which is fairly common in the Balkan area (I'm sort of including Israel and
| maybe Morocco in that - please don't shoot me).
| ...
Yeah; I guess I should have done a bit more proofreading. Dunno how
those slipped by. You're right, of course; the key signatures should
be (maybe I'll get it right this time):
K:G G major, as usual.
K:^G Just a ^G as the key signature, no tonic given.
K:E^G Just a ^G as the key signature, tonic is E.
K:^f_B_e Balkan and Middle-Eastern musicians will recognize this
K:D^f_B_e D hejaz/freygish scale
K:C^f_B_e C misheberach scale.
K:Dmaj_e_B D zengule scale
K:Dphr^f^c D zengule scale
K:D^f^c_e_B D zengule scale
K:Amix=g Paranoid A mixolydian, with explicit G natural.
These do have a variety of names in different languages, of
course, of which I remember only a few. Another I'm tempted
to add is:
K:G^f_B_e G harmonic minor scale.
That oughta confuse the classical crowd! I actually used this, or
rather the equivalent K:Gm^F, in a recent transcription. The tune was
mostly in D hejaz, but started off in G minor. So I thought, what the
hell, I'll label it with its initial tonic, but in a way that gives
the proper hejaz keysig. Not that anyone can tell by looking at the
printed music. I suppose it would qualify as "music geek humor".
ABC does subtly encourage you to label a tune with its initial key,
even if it changes key and is mostly in a second key. In this case,
there's the interesting subtlety that both keys use the same scale. I
have been known to use a new K: line when there's an enharmonic key
change, though I suppose doing this might puzzle a lot of people.
(I have heard a middle-eastern scale in which _F would be reasonable.
With a tonic of D, the scale starts D _E _F G A .... But I don't
recall what that scale is called.)
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