Am I correct in my assumption that the double sharps and flats which frequently appear when you transpose a piece are actually the *correct pitches*? However awkward they may be, and however appropriate it may be to simplify them through editing (as opposed to changing to an equivalent key), they are still technically correct. Am I right?
Crystal Premo [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Umm, yes, but there is lot more to it than that. Generally if you are changing some enharmonics, you should change the whole passage so that it appears to be in the correct key. For example, it is pretty common in modern music to go briefly to the key of the flat 7th. In G major, this would mean spelling everything in F for that passage. In Gb major, this would mean Fb major spellings, which would start to give you Bbb's so I might consider respelling the passage in E major. You would have to respell the ENTIRE passage, though, not just change the Bbb's to A's, otherwise it would give you wacky triads like Gb-A-Db instead of F#-A-C#, which get mighty hard to read quickly. And if it is Sondheim, well, he is already hard enough to read, so it is easy to make something pretty much unplayable through unconsidered enharmonic changes.
I am reading between the lines here, and assuming that a client has given you grief about some of the spellings in a transposition? This is dangerous ground to tread upon, but I might venture that you should charge more for difficult pieces like most of Sondheim, and your regular rates for the Lloyd-Webber and Richard Rodgers works, which contain much fewer notational problems than Sondheim. If the client balks, point out that he won't like the results unless you go through and spend the extra time to make the spellings right. I remember an early transposition I did of "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" and just the last eight or so measures gave me fits about which spellings to use. There was no excellent solution, just a series of bad ones, so like Captain Jack Aubry, I had to go with the "lesser of two weevils." ;-)
Christopher
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