Klarinet Archive - Posting 000634.txt from 2003/03

From: Karl Krelove <karlkrelove@-----.net>
Subj: RE: [kl] Key signatures
Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2003 12:20:56 -0500

Maybe the reason why this isn't done lies in the term "key signature," which
denotes a kind of shorthand identifier or representation for a theoretical
concept we in the West have come to call a "key." Knowing what "key" a piece
of music is "in" tells us all kinds of things about what to expect in terms
of melodic and harmonic relationships, formal structures and the like. Based
on those expectations we can anticipate a great deal of a piece's content,
making it more readable and understandable at the beginning stages of
learning it. Beethoven's Fifth would come out sounding exactly the same if
we removed the key signatures and substituted chromatic signs for each note
that needed one. But it would be harder to sight read, harder at first
glance to analyze, and would have made the learning curve more difficult for
the musicians who first performed it. Or indeed for any musicians who had to
perform it for the first time without benefit of all the recorded models
we've had available for the past seventy-five years. A lonely Ab or D# stuck
there all by itself next to the clef sign would tell us nothing useful about
the piece, nothing about its tonal center (if it has one), nothing on which
to "hang our hats" as we try to make aural sense of it before we begin to
try to play it. This is probably why composers who use synthetic scales not
based on European "keyality" write the chromatics as "accidentals."

A key signature of G# signifies absolutely nothing except that all the Gs
are sharped. Because our training and experience are so strongly rooted in
the European system of keys, a key signature of F# and C#, on the other
hand, tells us much about what to expect and how the notes of both the
melody and harmony (or to be more up-to-date foreground and background)
relate.

Karl Krelove

> -----Original Message-----
> From: B. Rite [mailto:b1rite@-----.net]
> Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2003 5:09 PM
> To: klarinet@-----.org
> Subject: [kl] Key signatures
>
>
> Obviously you can create any scale you wish with accidentals, but I'm
> wondering if any 'well known' compositions are printed with a weird key
> signature, such as (say) two flats but the flatted notes aren't Bb and
> Eb?
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>

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