Jack Campin writes:
|
| Here is a familiar Northumbrian tune that would be most cleanly
| represented using John's proposal:
|
| X:1
| T:Oh I Hae Seen the Roses Blaw
| M:6/8
| L:1/8
| K:G =f ^F % low F's sharp, high F's natural
| D|G2G B>AB|c2A F2D|G>AG B2c|d2g d2c|B2c d2e|f2d B2G|d>ed cBA|G3 G2:|
| d|g2d B2G |c2A F2D|g2d B2c|d2g d2c|B2c d2e|f2d B2G|d>ed cBA|G3 G2:|
|
| One reason why this makes sense here is that this was probably a
| (keyless) bagpipe tune originally, and those pitches would have
| been fixed for the intended instrument. On a pipe like that you
| can't do any pitch adjustment of individual notes, so accidental
| signs are just an irritating excrescence that breaks up the flow
| while you're reading. Putting the tonality in the key signature
| tells you what you want to know when you need to know it: can my
| pipe play this tune or not?
This is a nice example of the use of such key signatures to subtly
notate such scales. The piper probably doesn't pay much attention,
not having much choice in the matter. But the key signature is useful
to people playing other instruments. The accidentals do properly
belong in the key signature, because they mark the normal intonation
of the F and f notes.
This is conceptually similar to the way that highland pipers often
use a key signature of ^f^c=g. Again, the piper doesn't need this,
and highland pipe music is often written without any key signature at
all. But it's useful as advice to people playing other instruments.
Of course, in this case you might also want to know that the highland
pipes are normally tuned a semitone higher, but that's another topic.
Most of the examples I've seen of a note having different accidentals
in different octaves are in Indian music, where a small number of the
classical ragas have this property. I've seen some ragas' subjects
written out with key signatures like K:D=C^c or K:D=C^F_B^c. Of
course, a lot of ragas use different intonations on notes ascending
and descending, as does the European minor scale, and in such cases
you just write out the accidentals. But classical Indian musicians
consider key signatures like K:D=C^c rather conventional, as a simple
way of saying that the low 7th is normally flat and the high 7th is
normally sharp. The classical raga is never written out, of course,
but the subject matter often is, for reasons of memory and
scholarship. Indian musicians have been using a variant of European
staff notation for several centuries now, liberally mixed with the
older Indian notation based on their writing system..
I've seen a few similar cases in Greek and Turkish music, where for
example the zengule scale often has the low 7th flat and the high 7th
sharp. I've seen key signatures like K:D=C_E^F_B^c, generally with
the accidentals arranged in some compact fashion. But I don't think
this is common, or often needed. Thus, the well-known Greek tune
Misirlou starts in this scale, but there aren't any low 7th in the
first part of the tune, so it doesn't matter. Such key signatures
would only be useful if the melody's range covers both 7ths, and such
tunes are rather rare. Instrumentalists would be likely to play more
decorated versions of a tune, and the decorations would likely
include the low 7th, but the musician would know which 7th to use, so
again the key signature doesn't much matter.
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