cross-stave notation vs key signature vs accidentals
I’ve encountered a corner case in cross-stave notation (called double-stemmed beaming by Gould):
Screenshot from 3.2.3 but 3.6.2 behaves the same. This is about the last measure in the screenshot.
The notation graphically/visually matches the print edition (except for the lower stave half-note, whose stem obviously must not visually connect to the cross-stave beam), but the pitch of the circled note is in question.
I naïvely say G₃. (From the melody around this, G♯₃ makes no sense.) MuseScore says G♯₃ and will only emit G3 if I place an explicit ♮ in front of it.
So, which one is right?
Gould says:
I think I can read this as I’m right and MuseScore isn’t? Could a pro keyboardist please confirm?
Comments
I can see why MuseScore might choke on this. A cross-staff note technically belongs to the other stave, so it's rather hard to carry across an accidental which "belongs" to a different stave from the cross-staff note . I have always been happy enough to add the required accidental and then make it invisible.
In reply to I can see why MuseScore… by DanielR
OK, so it’s definitely a G₃ not a G♯₃? Thanks, will do that.
(I normally do vocal scores, but this one has accompaniment so I stumbled over this.)
Update (since it came up), this is what I decided for in the end, hiding the courtesy accidental. (And fixing that half-note stem…)
I read Gould the same as you, but I would add, no way would I want to count on someone reading it to know how that rule works. So just as with the first re-occurrence of a note after a tie from an altered pitch, I would always add the explicit accidental no matter which way I wanted it. Gould's example maybe is obvious enough because the notes are adjacent, but beyond that, rather than try to guess which cases are worth the explicit accidental and which are not, I'd err on the safe side.