Jean-Francois Moine skribis:
|
| Let's go further. Someone in the ABC-land will soon write:
|
| K:C ^e_f
|
| How do you feel "cdefg"?
Too late; this has already happened. ;-) I play several tunes in this
scale. Well, actually, it also has _B. Among klezmer, Balkan and
Middle-eastern musicians it's a familiar scale.
| Let's be serious: standard key signatures are needed by *all* musicians.
| When there are strange notes in a tune, these ones shall be indicated by
| explicit accidentals. This is (I think) the result of many centuries, so
| why had ABC not to follow these basic rules?
You have a serious gap in your logic here. It's likely true that all
musicians need the classical modes. Nobody is proposing doing away
with them. But it's not true that this covers all the music that all
musicians play. While you may not know or approve of non-classical
scales, you don't have the right to deny them to musicians who like
them. And you shouldn't be so arrogant as to decree that nobody needs
any notation that isn't used by your music.
Of course, nobody actually *needs* key signatures at all. You could
forget about them and always write all the accidentals before every
note. Many modern atonal music is written this way, because for that
music, key signatures are just confusing.
But key signatures were developed for a good reason. By listing a set
of accidentals along the left edge, you tell readers that these are
the "normal" intonations of those notes, and that those notes are "in
the scale" of the piece. Accidentals are then only needed for notes
that are outside the scale. This makes the music a lot more readable.
This is the reason that musicians in various other musical traditions
have been insisting that they want the correct key signatures on
their music. It's true that, if your scale is C D _E ^F G ..., you
can represent it as Bb and write in all the sharps before the F's.
But this is ugly because it's misleading. It tells the reader that a
^F is an altered note, when it isn't; ^F is the note that's in the
scale, and =F would be an altered note. So ^F should be in the
signature and =F should have accidentals.
Saying that one *could* use classical modes is trivially true and
irrelevant. It's true in the same sense that one could write all
music "in C" and use lots of accidentals. But this is bad notation.
Good notation shows the correct scale notes with the key signature
and uses accidentals for altered notes (or brief excursions to other
scales).
The other objection to saying K:Bb for C D _E ^F G ... is, if the
tonic is C, the K: line should say that the tonic is C. Saying K:Bb
is incorrect for the same reason that it would be wrong for music in
G minor or C mixolydian. If you're going to give a tonic note, it
helps a lot if you give the correct one. Otherwise we're better if
you don't give a tonic at all, but just list the key signature.
In any case, if you dislike the idea of ever discovering music that
uses non-Western scales, you should be very careful of what you look
at on the Net. There is a crowd of klezmer and Balkan musicians who
have discovered ABC and they are starting to use it. Some of them
have ABC tools that only allow classical key signatures. They grumble
a lot about ABC's stupid limitations, but they use it. As ABC tools
come along that allow for correct key signatures, they will start
using them, and you will be in serious danger of being offended by
music that doesn't fit your rules. So if you don't want to be upset
by weird music, you should be careful what you look at.
Sticking to music of northwest Europe may not even save you. There is
a lot of Scottish music written with a key signature of ^f^c=g. ABC
even has special notation for it: K:Hp. So be careful ...
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