Re: Nostalgia

[Juergen Reuter]

On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, Rune Zedeler wrote:

> Citat David Raleigh Arnold <address@hidden>:
>
> > The persistence of accidentals should be a voice context and not a staff
> > context issue.  For whatever reason, this did not come through clearly
> > from the big discussion of the subject.  It is a good idea to consider
> > any music with more than one part on a staff to be a reduction.
>
> It's not that simple. Stone has more on this.
>
> You don't REALLY mean, that the f in
>
> < \key c \major
>   \context Voice=va { fis a }
>   \context Voice=vb { d f } >
>
> should not get natural sign, do you?
>

Pragmatically seen, in most of the piano music (especially after the
period of baroque), I would say, you are definitely right, because the
pianist usually reads all "voices" simultaneously.  (I enclosed "voices"
here with quotation marks, because the concepts of voices and chords
often seem, especially in classical and romantic period, to be mixed up
within a single bar.)

In choir music, it is very bad but common practice to put e.g. the tenor
and bass voice into a single staff (actually, this is only a benefit for
the conductor, if he/she, as a pianist, wants to play all of the voices).
As a tenor singer, the bass voice is basically not more or less relevant
for me than e.g. the soprano voice.  Therefore, I am not interested in the
bass's accidentals -- at least not more than in the soprano's accidentals.
Therefore, while reading my voice, I do not want to simultaneously read
the bass's accidentals, so that in your above example, I personally would
prefer not to see a natural sign.

I can not remember any example where I would have had to regard the bass's
accidentals to get my own voice right; but I neither can recall any
example in choir music such as the one above given by you; maybe I should
have a more detailed look at this.

As bottom line, I think we really want to have both possibilities of
accidentals handling (something like a boolean property for turning on/off
some kind of barrier that prevents accidentals from floating into
neighbouring voices of the same staff).

Greetings,
Juergen