| > Just out of curiosity, are there any musical traditions/styles that | > use a relative (or cumulative) approach? I've never seen any, but | > that doesn't mean they don't exist. | | It's quite common in early music for a sharp-turned-45-degrees sign to | mean either a sharp or a naturalization of a flat.
Yeah; that's an intermediate form. Before the natural sign was widely used, it does seem to have been common to use flats and sharps to cancel each other. But I don't think I've seen any "cumulative" use of this. For example, if you had B flat in the key signature, would anyone have written in a flat to get a double flat? I've never seen this, but I wouldn't be too surprised, either. | > This seems somewhat related to the old question of the persistence of | > accidentals. Current conventional practice is that accidentals last | > to the next bar line, but there are several musical styles that use | > the "only the one note" rule. This is true for European music before | > 1600 or so, and also for much modern music (especially atonal). | | Looking up the first two atonal scores that came to hand, neither of | them do this. Robert Crawford's Variations for Recorder and Piano uses | the ordinary to-the-next-barline rule, and Schoenberg's Variations for | Orchestra uses a third rule, "every note gets an accidental on its | first occurrence in a bar, and that accidental stays in force until | there is a change in pitch" (there are a lot of repeated notes in the | score). I think Webern did the same, but can't find a score at the | moment. That's yet another scheme. I don't have any feeling for how common any of these is. I've seen it, but I haven't played all that much modern, atonal music. It's probably only useful "when it's useful", that is, when there's a serious problem with keeping track of the accidentals in a measure. But this can be ameliorated by cutting the bar length in half, so I'd guess it's not all that important. In any case, it seems reasonable that ABC's default behavior should be to say that accidentals are "absolute", and persist until the next bar line. ABC tools with support for other styles (such as Medieval music, 4-line staves, etc.) would presumably have options to control such behavior. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
