On 5 Jul 2006 at 15:34, Andrew Stiller wrote: > Actually, come to think of it, I find the whole idea of a "courtesy > accidental" more than a little weird. When I write an accidental, > parenthesized or not, there is no courtesy involved! It's just me, as > a composer, doing my damnedest to get the players to play what I want > them to play instead of something else. Maybe they'll have the > courtesy to do that, but experience has taught me not to hold my > breath.
Well, the definition of "required accidentals" has changed over time. In the repertory I'm transcribing (1780-1820), any accidental in any octave changes all notes of the same pitch class in all octaves. Adding additional accidentals would be confusing to contemporary (i.e., c. 1800) readers of the music, because they thought in terms of keys and tonalities, and so an accidental introduced in one octave meant something about the key. Additional accidentals were, from their point of view, unnecessary, and including them could have confused them. Returning to our modern conventions, it's important to consider whether a sight reader will think when they see an accidental "oh, yes, that's an accidental I already know is there so that's not a change" or if a sight reader will instead think "er, what? I thought that note was already natural/sharp/flat? Why is there an accidental there? Was I wrong about it before that point?" To avoid this latter reaction, I would use parens whenever it's not a strictly necessary accidental. On the other hand, I'd define that very narrowly, since I"d consider cross-relation accidentals to be "necessary" (i.e., conflicting accidental in different octaves). Sometimes passages are just ambiguous and could be interpreted in more than one tonally sensible manner, and in those cases, I would think "courtesy" accidentals are necessary to make clear exactly what is intended. Whether those should have parens or not is going to depend on context, I think. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
