“There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major” - Arnold Schoenberg possibly apocryphal, because I’ve never seen a direct citation
Try finding pieces, beyond the first pages of a beginners’ book, which only use the white keys. (There’s only one I know of…)
Didn’t say pieces written in that key only used the white keys, I said the scale as played in that key only uses the white keys.
Wouldn’t it be simpler to have musical notation based on a twelve note scale, rather than all these combinations of sharps and flats that you have to deal with? Then, the score would look the same no matter what key it was in. You’d still have to play different notes on the instrument depending on the key, but at least the notation wouldn’t have to change.
It seems to me that forcing seven-note-scale notation on to a fundamentally twelve-note system causes more trouble than it is worth. How many musically talented people have been put off learning an instrument because they couldn’t get their head round the notation?
Rewriting the best part of a millenium of evolution of a notation system isn’t easy! Leaving aside the idea of transcribing everything, or actually relearing how to read music (imagine if you were given an English book, written using a foreign script, maybe Arabic or Greek?)…
The system we have has huge benefits, not least being able to present a range of eighteen different pitches merely within the five-line system. Anything using more than five lines introduces a far greater element of human error, due to visual confusion.
And the notation at the minute is no more oriented around tonal systems than it is around twelve chromatic steps. If somebody’s being put off learning an instrument because the relationship between the music and the notation isn’t clear, then there’s a problem with the way it’s being taught. (Unless there’s a specific learning difficulty, which is a different matter entirely.)
But you can’t represent eighteen pitches with five line notation. You have to start adding extra symbols like sharps and flats.
However, you can represent eleven pitches, if you use the space outside the top and bottom lines, which is tantalisingly close to twelve. Perhaps a six line system with no sharps or flats would be simpler than the five line system.
Anyway, I don’t expect musicians to read my post and suddenly tear up hundreds of years of manuscripts and unlearn everything they know, and I realise that I am not the first crank^H^H^H^H^H person to propose “improvements” to standard musical notation. I’m talking more about what would be the best notation system if we had the luxury of starting from scratch.
Amen to that. I hate the conventional staff. Counterintuitive. Two notes in the same vertical position differentiated by some stupid floating symbol in front? Stupid.
My favorite interface is a “piano roll”, in which each horizontal line is a different pitch in the 12-pitch-per-octave sense, and duration is by horizontal width of the notebar. I can compose in that so much easier than I can in the bar staff.
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——— likes to say “stupid” a lot
Funny, since I’ve been a little kid, flatted keys for me were always intuitive. I love G-flat and D-flat and everything else. Notate it in sharps, and for some reason, my brain has to pause an extra nanosecond before reading the note.
GorillaMan – what’s the White Key song you’re thinking of? I can’t for the life of me figure out what it could be. Every C major song I can think of has at least an F# or B flat in it, and the A minor songs have F# and G#. I know Chopin has his Black Key Etude (well, a lone white note does sneak into it), but I can’t think of any White Key counterpart.
I disagree. I find the notation system used today would be much easier to read quickly than expanding the staff. Each note represented individually on a score would be a terrible mess quickly.
It works well for me. For a piece in E major, I know there’s four sharps–they’re represented on the staff, and most of the piece will not have notes outside the E major scale. Therefore, most of the notes will not have accidentals in front of them and when I do see an accidental, I know it’ll be a note outside the normal scale (or cancelling the previous accidental). I think it works great, and I don’t see why you would want to change it by discretely notating each note. That would truly be a pain in the ass, especially on an 88-key instrument like the piano.
Anyhow, if there were ever any change to the musical notation system I’d like–and I’m not exactly sure how this would work–it’s that I wish notation were relative rather than explicitly tied to the key. In other words, a notation in which all keys were written the same, just a little note telling you what key to play passages in preceding the score.
Is this making sense? I think it was help facilitate transposition. For example, I have a much quicker time translating a vi7-ii7-V7-Imaj7 chord progression into any key than looking at a piece in B-flat major, seeing Gm7-Cm7-F7-BflatMaj7 translating that into vi7-ii7-V7-Imaj7 and then playing it in a target key. Perhaps this is just a function of how my brain transposes. I always try to memorize chord charts in terms of the Roman numeral system rather than by actual chords because it gives me more flexibility and less headaches if I ever have to transpose the piece.
Well yeah, I was imagining a notation in which there were only twelve notes, not 88! Higher octaves would be represented by the same notation, and look the same. The score would be relative to whatever key you were in, naturally.
The whole point would be to do away with the current notation system in which the same music can look radically different merely because it is in a different key.
I’m still not quite following you. If you’re only notating 12 notes, how are you notating two handed chords that can straddle several octaves? Heck, how are you notating just a 3-note chord consisting of tonic, fifth, tenth?
You’d have enough six-line staves, or whatever scheme you use to notate a twelve-tone octave, for the piece in question. One for each octave.
Shostakovich, 24 preludes & fugues, the C major fugue. A fugue with no black keys?! Yep.
The chromatic system is a later development. Particularly important to the five-line stave is that, with the expansion of a single ledger line in each direction, it can pretty much accomodate the normal human vocal range, and just the correct clef is needed at the beginning.
So for a piano piece, you’re suggesting eight staves, each representing an octave? And this would help us teach people to read music?
Six-line staves don’t work, as was found by trial-and-error in the fifteenth century. For whatever reason, the practical results of using them indicates that we (in the widest sense) find it far more difficult to identify, at speed, spaces and lines in a six-line system than in five lines.
As for relative keys, I’m with you. Put everything into C clefs, and you get real harmonic awareness (yes, I’m jesting, but my own harmonic awareness improved massively when I started to spend time with transcriptions entirely in C clefs)
(For the layman - ‘put everything into C clefs’ is not all that far from what Usram is suggesting, but still presents huge problems, in that few people can read it fluently.)
It would be notated relative to the key. And you could easily notate +/- octaves rather than showing the entire spectrum of human hearing. C’mon, think outside the box!
‘Relative to the key’? You know a piano keyboard isn’t regular? And 8va etc. already exist as instructions to play in a different octave, if you thought that was an innovation 
But you objected that this new notation would make it difficult to notate different octaves. I proposed the same solution that is used in standard notation.
No, 8vas are used only in extreme situations, e.g. either end of the piano, the very top end of the violin. There’s the precedent set for extreme instruments to sound an octave higher or lower than they are notated (piccolo and double bass), but that’s something that those particular instruments have always done. Everything else manages to notate its entire range within two staves. Except organs, and they’re a bit odd. And cellos when Rostropovich plays or Xenakis writes. And they’re odd, too.
So how do you notate an octave? Say I’m playing low c and middle c with my left hand and the Cs an octave and two above with my right? That’s four keys, all which would be same note under your system, all played at the same time. How would you notate this?