Courtesy Accidentals on tied-over notes at system/page break

• Nov 30, 2015 - 08:15

Hi, I do some work for various music publishing houses. A recurring topic, which no notation software so far has an out-of-the-box solution, is the problem setting courtesy accidentals on page or system break on notes that are "tied together" (notes connected with a ligature, not a slur; sorry, I don't know how to express that in proper English).

The note on the next system should have an accidental in parenthesis or brackets, even though it is tied-over. And in case there is a repetition in the same measure, that note must have its accidental, anyway. The enclose file demonstrates what I mean:

Bildschirmfoto 2015-11-30 um 09.16.37.png

At the moment, I enter the accidentals and brackets manually, which is very time consuming, error prone and of course a test for one's nerves once it comes to a re-layout, where all the page and system breaks change.

How do you approach this problem? Is there a plugin available?

Thanks for any hints!

Attachment Size
test_accidentals_on_tied_notes_on_system_break.mscz 6.9 KB

Comments

• Nov 30, 2015 - 20:36

There is a plugin for courtesy accidentals which works quite well, but it does not add the optional courtesy accidental on the tied note - it only does the standard courtesy accidentals on untied notes in the next measure. At some point, we would love to incorporate this into the core program and also make it more flexible by handling the situation you describe as well as other optional cases like different octaves in the same measure or accidentals more than one measure later.

For now, though, doing it manually - and only when completely done with anything that could affect system layout - is the way to go I'm afraid.

Here is the courtesy accidental plugin:

https://musescore.org/en/project/courtesyaccidentals

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• Nov 30, 2015 - 22:39

Incidentally, in my experience this convention is seldom used, certainly by English music publishing houses.

The general rule dinned into me while training is that a tied note does not need an accidental, even if it is on the next line.

I can think of instances where this convention might be useful, but, to be honest, they are not common, in the scores I work from habitually.

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• Nov 30, 2015 - 22:48

FWIW, Elaine Gould in Behind Bars calls it "helpful" but doesn't quite go so far as to recommend it. She specifically mentions it is "often better not to" in music with many tied chords. Still, have seen it often enough to think it would be worthwhile including this as an option should we design a courtesy accidental tool. I'm thinking a dialog with checkboxes to control that, treatment of octaves in same measure as well as following measure, use of parentheses, and to specify a number of measures to consider an accidental to last for the purpose of deciding when a courtesy accidental is needed. Hmm, maybe also an option for the convention that requires an accidental on every altered note even within the same measure. That probably covers the most common variations in policy.

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• Dec 1, 2015 - 07:48

Thanks for the response, the ideas and the tips!

I, of course, only can only speak of the experience I made in my area, which is contemporary classical music. But in this particular case, all the major publishing houses like Universal Edition, Schott, Ricordi, Bärenreiter, Schott, Donemus, but also those, who concentrate on old music and historical editions like Adeva require the courtesy accidental.

There is this one particular rule, which you quite certainly have already heard: whenever you find a single page of a score, it needs to have all the information needed to reproduce it acoustically as well as bring it back to its "mother" (where it got lost from or whatever).

Seen from the perspective of a performer (e.g. conductor), it is actually a very understandable approach, I think. A lot of time would get wasted, if you had to check for each not on every new page in a composition like Boulez' "pli selon pli" or Stockhausen's "Gruppen".

So thinking about implementing this feature as an "option" (with all the additional aspects that are mentioned here), is certainly most welcome, and if I would vote anywhere, I would. :-) But I also think it would be a feature that would set MuseScore apart from all the other software out there, and maybe eventually be the program of choice for publishing houses...

Actually, there is a second thing that is needed quite often and isn't supported by either of those notation software packages out there, and that is "beginning dashed in lyrics on text syllables, again on system/page break". I could imagine that this would also be a feature that would set MuseScore apart from other programs, at least seen from a publishing house's perspective.

Well... just my 2 cents... :-)

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