Music Notation Basics Part II - Key Signatures & Accidentals
(28 Oct 04)
Using Key Signatures
You could make a lifelong career as a successful musician without ever knowing how key signatures are created. But, you now know what they are, where the flats and sharps come from, what scales they pertain to and why the sharps and flats are written in the order they are. Why do we even care?
Here is a short piece of music in B major. The notes of this scale are B - C# - D# - E - F# - G# - A#, and I've used a number of those notes here:
Ignore what this sounds like and focus instead on what it looks like. There are just seven notes here, but four of them use accidentals. Imagine an entire composition where nearly all the A, C, D, F and G notes have accidentals in front of them. It would be tedious, and hard to read. Let's look at the same award-winning composition using a key signature:
What happened? The key signature—over there on the left next to the clef—tells you that the music is in B major (“in the key of B”). But, it also says this: every A, C, D, F and G that appears in this music is to be played as though there were a sharp; that is, as though the note had a '#' in front of it. In other words, the sharps are understood, not written. Also, because none of these notes has an accidental in front of it, it also tells you they are all members of the indicated key. That seems handy.
The Natural Accidental
You may be wondering what to do if, in your composition, you want to write a note that does not agree with what the key signature indicates. In the last example above, we said the key signature means all Fs are to be sharped. As a composer, I'm certainly free to write in B major, but occassionally use an F natural! How do you write an F natural? You do this using the new accidental I promised earlier, called the natural. I show it below:
The natural appears in front of the F. It always appears in front of the note just like the sharp and the flat, and it 'overrides' or 'takes precedence over' what the key signature says to do. In Part III, I will provide some rules that apply to all accidentals that make it easier to read and write music using them. For now, just think of the natural accidental as temporarily canceling the key signature for a particular note.
Other Accidentals
There are two more accidentals I need to introduce, then you will have seen them all. The first is the double sharp, the other the double flat.
A single sharp raises the tone of a note by a semitone, and so a double sharp raises it by two semi-tones, or a whole tone. The double-sharp looks like an 'x', often with four dots at the left, right, top and bottom of the 'x'. The double flat lowers the tone of a note by a whole tone, and is written using two flats side-by-side ('bb').
Now, since by now you know that there are two semi-tones between say C and D, you may wonder why I'd ever write Cx (C##) instead of just D. Or, why you would ever write Dbb instead of C, for example. For this Basic Notation series, let me just say that sometimes we might not want to change the letter name of the note. Leaving the note name 'C' and just adding the double sharp, instead of using the letter name 'D', may convey some other important fact to the musician. This is a detail that is good to set to the side for now.
Transposing
In Part I we learned how the lines and spaces of the staff correspond to specific note names. The bass and treble staffs are shown below, labeled with the note names for review.
The location of the note names on these staffs is standard and is never changed for any given clef. But, in Part I, I described how music for guitar is written one octave higher than the instrument actually sounds. This is a standard practice, and results in guitar music that is generally more centered on the treble clef. The example below shows that, to sound out a Middle C on guitar, guitar music will actually show the C in the 3rd space of the treble staff. We say the music has been 'transposed', or shifted, up one octave.
Other instruments also play tones that are one octave lower than the music written for them, including the string bass and bassoon. On the other hand, piccolo music is written one octave lower than the notes actually played.
What these examples have in common is that the music written and the notes played have the same names. Music for guitar, string bass and piccolo will all show a 'C' when the composer wants the instrument to produce a C. The same is of course true for all other notes as well, not just C. These instruments are said to play in 'concert pitch', and for convenience, are called "C instruments".
The music for some instruments, however, is shifted (transposed) by an amount other than an octave. You may have heard the term 'Bb clarinet' or 'Bb cornet' in school. These are called 'Bb instruments' because when the music for these instruments includes the note C, these instruments actually produce a Bb below that written C.
So, music for Bb instruments is transposed up two semitones to compensate for this fact, and to ensure the musician plays in concert pitch--that is, plays with everyone else! You can therefore find 'Bb Edition' fakebooks or other sheetmusic, where the transposing has been done for you. Below is a section of an etude previously published here at iBreathemusic. The first is the etude as written for a C instrument. If this music were handed to a clarinetist, the actual tones produced when played would be those shown on the second section of music below. Notice that these notes are each a whole tone below the corresponding notes in the first section.
Tenor and soprano saxophones are also Bb instruments, but alto and baritone saxophones are Eb instruments. The naming convention is the same as for Bb instruments: when music for an Eb instrument includes a C, the instrument actually produces an Eb. Alto sax music is transposed up nine semitones, from Eb up to C, but the baritone sax is shifted nine semitones PLUS a full octave more. You will see music labeled 'for Eb instruments' or simply 'Eb Edition'. Instruments such as Bb and Eb instruments, where the music is transposed by some amount other than an octave, are called 'transposing instruments'. Even though guitar music is transposed, it is a C instrument--it plays C when the written note is a C. C instruments are not usually referred to as transposing instruments.
Next time you look at published sheet music such as The Ultimate Jazz Fakebook, for example, notice that the books are available in a variety of editions, including C Edition, Eb Edition, Bb Edition and so on. You now know what this means and that, for guitar, you want the C Edition. You also know now that these labels do not mean that the music in the book has been written in the key of C or Bb. It means all of the music has been written for play by C instruments, Bb instruments or what have you. But, C Edition music has NOT been transposed for guitar. Since it is written for all C instruments, some of which are transposed and some of which are not (such as piano), you have to do the one-octave transposing yourself.
I added all this material because I felt it is a simple but very important thing to know as you start reading music notation, and it all has to do with how we place notes on a staff vertically, which was the main theme of Parts I and II of this Series. Plus, I also felt that we often stumble across the idea of transposing instruments accidentally--it is not a topic that seems to be covered at the right time to me.
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