Goodness me, this thread is becoming very interesting, intricate, and
diverse. I have a few more responses.
[James O'Briant:]
>... writing tonal music with no key signature and with a lot of accidentals,
>when using a key signature would make it far easier for the performer.
I would generally agree with this, although I can see borderline cases.
What about pieces that are definitely tonal, but simply very chromatic within
that tonality? Or pieces that are what I would call partly tonal?: they tend to
revolve around a tonal centre, are not really atonal, but not entirely tonal
either.
Would key signatures be best used or omitted in cases like this?
There are three Preludes for piano by Delius - hardly a radical or
unconventional composer, even by the standards of his own time. They are all in
D major, in a kind of impressionistic style of the typical Delius kind; yet they
are all written without key signature - yet I have no difficulty reading the
score. But, equally, I feel it would not really pose any difficulty if a
2-sharp key signature had been used instead. The music itself is of the partly
tonal kind I mentioned above: fairly chromatic, and "around" D major rather than
"in" it.
As it happens, this partly tonal style tends to be typical of quite a bit
of work I've done, and I tend to decide whether or not to use key signatures on
a case-by-case basis. This is one thing I don't have a definite system to.
>Or writing a piece in 24/4 time when six measures of 4/4 would do just as
>well and be easier for the performer.
The composer in a case such as this might have wanted to convey a
larger-scale sextuple rhythm, one unit of which encompasses a cycle of the
smaller quadruple rhythm. I would myself want to use long bars to encompass
this larger sextuple rhythm, if it remained consistent for any significant
period. (Does this violate many house styles?)
But perhaps it might be easier to read if the note-values were halved or
even quartered, using time signatures 3/1 or 3/2 (if the sextuple rhythm was 3
groups of 2), or else 6/2 or 6/4 (if the sextuple rhythm was 2 groups of 3).
This would enable more notes to be beamed together, which would make the music
far easier to read because the beaming could indicate subsidiary rhythmic
groupings. Whether to use half-values or quarter-values would probably largely
depend on how far you wanted to subdivide the original crotchets, now quavers or
semiquavers, into smaller notes.
If the crotchets (quarter notes) in the original 24/4 were felt to be the
beat unit, this would result in the beat being a quaver or semiquaver (eighth or
sixteenths) in the new, easier-to-read version, which might seem a little
unusual. But I don't see any real difficulty with this; if you look at the slow
movements of many Beethoven sonatas, you find a situation where notes of similar
duration are notated as quavers or semiquavers, and, at least as far as
practical perception goes, they could easily be heard as the beat unit -
whatever the time signature dictates that the beat "officially" is (crotchet,
dotted crotchet, or whatever).
If there were reasons the composer wanted to keep the 24/4, and not halve
or quarter note-values, perhaps dotted bar-lines would help mark out the smaller
subdivisions in each bar - and this would be another option. I'd agree that an
unmodified 24/4 would perhaps be better avoided.
It might need to be renamed something else, though, since I would read
24/4, 24/16, or 24-anything as falling in 8 groups of three notes. For 6 groups
of 4, a signature with 24 on top would be incorrect. A time signature of
24-anything perhaps can't be regarded as orthodox; but the interpretation of
being in groups of 3 seems a reasonable extrapolation from 12/8 being 4 groups
of 3, not 3 of 4.
The fact that Beethoven, in his Piano Sonata no. 32 in C minor, op. 111,
used 6/16 incorrectly in the final set of variations, where 3/8 would be
correct, doesn't change this. Just because Beethoven got it wrong here is no
reason why others should not be encouraged to use time signatures correctly.
The commonest error in this area is the use of 6/4 to indicate 3 groups of
2 crotchets (quarters), where this should really be indicated by 3/2. I've seen
this frequently in the scores of well-known composer. (Sometimes you see 6/4,
with 3/2 added after it in parentheses.)
Beethoven's use of 6/16 in place of 3/8 is exactly a parallel kind of
error. That it is wrong is most plainly seen by reflecting on how it would look
for 6/8 to be used in place of 3/4; any musician would instinctively realize
something was wrong here.
(And, if anyone's wondering, no, I don't know how much pressure I would put
on composers if I were an editor to correct such things, if they insisted on
what they had written. I'm just glad I'm not an editor, since I'd have a real
conflict of interest here: the error would grate on me, and I wouldn't want to
be responsible for promoting clearly wrong usage; but I am not temperamentally
inclined to try to make others do anything against their will.)
Regards,
Michael Edwards.
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