I really think we are talking about two different things here, Darcy.
Nobody complains at the intelligent respelling of notes that an good
arranger such as yourself will use for logical reading. (And horn
players, particularly, do not like double sharps and flats.) But I
see, very often, the same thing John mentions: ignorant or inadvertent
mispellings, and I find them distracting. Diatonic passages with a
note or two in the wrong enharmonic, etc. Recently I had to coach a
couple of high school trombone students in excerpts sent out for
All-State Band auditions that some joker somewhere recopied with
enharmonic mistakes. I used them as a teaching moment ("Sometimes
it's our task to play incorrectly notated music the best we can..."
etc.)
I do recall, back in the late 70s - the Louisville Orchestra would
participate in the Romantic Festival at Butler U in Indianapolis,
playing and often recording neglected Romantic rep. Some of those
works could get rather over-baked, both in harmony and enharmonic
writing, especially when modulating, but were always spelled
"correctly." The first time you read through a passage with an F
double sharp followed by a Gb (the note going up on the page but down
in pitch) does make one sit up and pay attention!
Raymond Horton
Bass Trombonist, Louisville Orchestra
Minister of Music, Edwardsville (IN) UMC
Composer, Arranger
VISIT US AT rayhortonmusic.com
On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 12:42 AM, Darcy James Argue
<[email protected]> wrote:
> To be fair, it's also because "proper" vertical spelling of enharmonics in
> highly chromatic music (like jazz, and like a lot of interesting
> pop/B'way/etc) frequently results in less legible parts than you'd get by
> spelling parts in a horizontally logical fashion.
>
> At one point, I experimented with spelling every accidental according to
> Hoyle, regardless of the resultant double-sharps and double-flats, etc. The
> musicians I presented this to universally *hated* it, even those with
> extensive classical backgrounds.
>
> The expectation in jazz (and pop etc) is that you will spell accidentals with
> a minimum of fuss, and players get ornery if you get too cute, even if the
> accidentals are technically correct.
>
> I'm all for spelling basic chord tones consistently on parts that actually
> show the entire harmony (piano, guitar). At no point should anyone ever write
> a B major seventh chord with an Eb and A#. But at at a certain point,
> musicians of all stripes learn to tune by ear, not by eye. So no, I'm not
> that sympathetic to the idea that string players tune an F# and a Gb
> differently, because in point of fact, *good* string players learn to hear
> where they are in the harmony and adjust accordingly, enharmonics be damned
> -- just like wind players and brass players.
>
> Cheers,
>
> - DJA
> -----
> WEB: http://www.secretsocietymusic.org
>
>
>
> On 10 Jun 2012, at 12:33 AM, Christopher Smith wrote:
>
>> Well, G flat in the key of G is not completely out of the question, but I
>> get your point.
>>
>> A lot of pops arrangers come from a jazz background, where proper enharmonic
>> spelling seems to be valued much less. Maybe it's because they don't realise
>> that string players actually choose a different finger to play an F sharp
>> than a G flat, and the two notes are tuned quite differently in most
>> contexts. After all, the piano plays them both exactly the same way.
>>
>> Another factor is most jazz musicians don't know about augmented sixth
>> chords and how they should be spelled, and don't realise that their
>> treasured Tritone Subs are actually augmented 6th chords. So an Ab7 chord
>> resolving to Gmaj7 in the key of G should have an F sharp (aug 6th), not a G
>> flat. So that might be considered to be illiteracy.
>>
>> Possibly some of those flipped enharmonics comes from Finale itself, where
>> hitting the 9 key in Speedy does not flip the enharmonic in a bulletproof
>> fashion. I have often come back to a part that I was certain I had spelled
>> correctly, only to find that some of the enharmonics I had flipped had
>> changed themselves back again when I wasn't looking. I sure hope they fix
>> that bug soon.
>>
>> Christopher
>>
>>
>> On Sat Jun 9, at SaturdayJun 9 7:06 PM, Robert Patterson wrote:
>>
>>> I see as much pops rep as any pro horn player, and almost all of it has key
>>> sigs, so you are certainly going with the flow. Nevertheless I greatly
>>> appreciate when the parts don't. Key sigs are not a problem except when the
>>> (often just momentary) key of the piece is different than the key
>>> signature. That's when they turn into a pain. That's when I wish users of
>>> computers would follow the old practice of adding courtesy accis when notes
>>> are chromatic to the momentary key. For example, if the piece is in F but
>>> has momentarily modulated to C, any B-flats should have courtesy accis,
>>> even though they are in the key sig. Or if the momentary key is Ab, then
>>> D-natural should have a courtesy acci.
>>>
>>> The other thing that drives me crazy in pops charts is gross mis-spellings
>>> of notes. These are the result of working at lightspeed with Fin/Sib, etc.,
>>> and not always the result of a flatly illiterate arranger. At least I'd
>>> like to think so. (I can't tell you how many times I've seen F# in the key
>>> of G spelled as G-flat!) Ironically, this is a hazard mainly of providing
>>> parts with no key sig, so pops arrangers just can't win. :-P
>>
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