>> 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. [...] > The mode/key/accidental stuff is way too complicated for the > average folk player
Okay, so imagine you're playing a harp-family instrument like the hammered dulcimer or Turkish kanun. What you want to know *first* is what pitches occur in the piece; you do the appropriate tuning or lever-flipping, and unless the piece has some chromatic bits in it (which it probably won't if it's standard repertoire for those instruments) you never want to see an accidental, it would just be notational noise. You will do something phenomenologically similar with a microtonally fretted instrument like the tanbur, or even when beginning a vocal piece in a microtonal mode; most pieces in the repertoire begin with a "tuning-up" section in which the fingers or vocal chords settle in to the set of pitches that will be used in the main body of the composition. The explicit signature, without accidentals-that-aren't-really, models exactly what operations the performer does, in the order in which they do them. Which is why it's been standard practice in Turkish music for a hundred years. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM "Embro, Embro". ------> off-list mail to "j-c" rather than "abc" at this site, please <------ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
