 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: David A
Date: 2009-11-03 05:05
Hello all,
I'm currently doing a research project for school, analysing Poulenc's Clarinet Sonta Movement 1. Would anyone be able to tell me the key signature? It would be of great help
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Author: mrn
Date: 2009-11-03 18:20
I think a little more explanation is due, because this is important stuff, and I think our young friend here needs to know about it.
In the 20th century, many composers moved away from using traditional harmony and diatonic (major and minor) scales. In a lot of cases, they scrapped the whole key signature system, too, preferring to rely only on accidentals to denote black-key notes (i.e., the black keys on a piano).
For some composers, this was a really obvious choice. Some composers began to write "atonal" music, where there is no key. Arguably one of the more extreme forms of atonality was the 12-tone serialist style of composers such as Webern, Berg, and (in his later years, after he invented the style) Schoenberg, where each piece would be constructed by manipulating a row of notes containing all 12 notes of the chromatic scale in succession (thus giving all 12 notes equal importance). Obviously, using a key signature would be pointless in a piece where all 12 chromatic-scale notes appear over and over again like that.
However, even many composers who still wrote "tonal" music (that is, music where there is some pitch like "C" or "Bb" that the music centers around) also wrote without key signatures. One good reason for this was that although they may have written pieces centered around a particular pitch, their music still broke free (at least in part) from the use of diatonic scales and the traditional harmony built on those scales. I would put the Poulenc Sonata in this category. Hindemith's Clarinet Sonata is also written without key signatures for similar reasons. If you look in the piano parts (well, and the solo parts, too for that matter) to these pieces, you can see that the music is more concerned with generating or moving by particular intervals (such as major 2nds and perfect 4ths) than with being in a particular major or minor key--so accidentals abound and at the end of the day there's really little point to sticking with a key signature in this kind of music, either.
Incidentally, there was another movement in 20th century music called pandiatonicism (or informally, "white key music" [referring to the white keys of a piano]). A lot of Aaron Copland's most famous works (like Appalachian Spring) were written in this style. Composers writing in this style still used diatonic scales, but didn't use traditional harmonic techniques and freely employed dissonance generated out of tones taken from the diatonic scales. In this kind of music, key signatures have a more useful role to play. Hence, you usually see key signatures in Copland's pandiatonic works, for example.
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