Because it’s in the key of G, and the only way to indicate that is with the F# in the key signature. Please note that the key signature is not descriptive, telling you that there actually IS an F# note in the piece; rather it is prescriptive – it means that any F note that might occur is to be rendered as an F#. Also note that there are other features of being in the key of G beyond the sharped F, and certainly some or all of them are present. There’s nothing but confusion to be gained to have a key signature at odds with the actual key of the piece.
No, because the other features of being in the key of G would be in conflict with that. The key isn’t just about what notes are present. You could have a piece in G with natural F notes (flatted F#'s) and it’s still in the key of G.
This is largely due to historical accident. In equal temperament tuning, as is popular nowadays, there’s no inherent difference between, say, E and E flat (unless you have perfect pitch). The interval between frequencies of adjacent notes is always exactly the twelfth root of two. But equal temperament hasn’t always been popular, and in older times, it was more common to use tunings that made chord intervals exact small-integer ratios like 3:2 and 4:3. The catch is that you can’t make all of the chord intervals in all the keys exact small-integer ratios like that, so for any given temperament, different keys were “out of tune” in slightly different ways. This is what originally gave E and E flat their different “feels”.
But of course, composers knew about these different feels, so a composer who was writing a bombastic song would put it in E, while one who wanted gloom and hope would put it in E flat. And because the music for different keys was written that way, we still know of the distinctions in mood between the keys, even though that itself is no longer with us.
Now, I’m the one who spent seven years grappling with musicological questions, and at least three TA’ing music theory in some capacity, but even I think you guys are making a mountain out of a molehill, here, lol. I think the simple answer is that the OP was simply looking at a melody line without harmony.
That’s how I’ve seen them generally notated. Major modes like lydian and mixolydian are written in their major key signature and then sharped 4th and flatted sevenths, respectively, are applied. Minor modes (dorian, phrygian, etc) get written in the relative minor and the proper accidentals are applied during the playing.
I’m actually fine with reading them written the more concise way, with something like C lydian written with a single F sharp in the key signature, but that’s not really usual. I even don’t mind signature with a sharp and a flat in the key signature (like, say F# and Bb for C lydian-mixolydian), but these are not “classical” Western harmony key signatures and would confuse many musicians with more traditional training. I don’t know who the first person was to start using non-conventional notations like this, but I know I came across it in either one of Bartok’s collections for early piano players or perhaps one of Kodaly’s works for beginners.
Another thing I notice in hymnals that I cannot figure out is the notation of a seemingly random series of numbers for each song. They look something like this (ignore the actual numerals, I’m making them up):
45 45 45 6
or
16 16 88
or
33 33 33 9
Not all hymnals have this, but the ones that do seem to have it for virtually every song.
mmm
That’s the scansion of the text of the hymn. That’s so if you’re really bored of singing ‘O God of truth’ to the Scottish Psalter tune, you can sing the text of it to the tune of ‘God of the Farmlands’, or any other 8 6 8 6 that you find in the hymnal.
Most of those types of hymnals will have a ‘Metrical Index of Tunes’ in the back. Other 8686s in the Hymn Book of the Anglican and United Churches of Canada include -
I don’t know any tunes in Lydian or Mixolydian off hand, but I’m looking at the chart for “So What” in the Real Book [and three other books]. It is in D Dorian - the key signature is C Major. Is this a classical vs. jazz way of notating songs?
I don’t necessarily think so. In re-reading what I wrote, I should back off a little, since it’s in popular music that I’ve usually encountered modes, and those I generally see notated in plain major or minor keys. For example, my lead sheet to Eleanor Rigby is notated with one sharp, indicating E minor, even though the song is in E dorian. That said, I don’t know how classical pieces that are modal are usually notated, as I can’t think of any classical modal piece I’ve come across.
Most modal music I deal with is Gregorian chant in the church modes. They tend to have no key signatures, and stemless note heads. I can’t speak for modern modal music, like Ralph Vaughn-Willams and such.
That’s possible because these two songs have the same scansion (they scan the same), meaning the layout of syllables and accents can be interchanged between the two. Another way to say it is that when read as poetry, the lyrics have the same meter.
What Le Ministre has done is provided a sample of hymns that have the same scansion/meter, designated as 8-6-8-6 (syllable count?). These were found in the hymnal’s metrical (refers to meter) index, and since they all scan the same they can all be sung to each other’s tunes, just as “Amazing Grace” can be sung to the tune of “The House of the Rising Sun” (and vice versa).
We use Gather at my church as well, along with the Canadian “Catholic Book of Worship II and III.” And yeah, like I thought when I read the OP, Gather has very few hymns written with the harmony, so that’s where the F#s are hidden.
To rephrase what Le Ministre said, those numbers are the verse length in syllable. Common measure being a line of 8 syllables, a line of 6, then a line of 8, and another line of 6. It’s based on the form of the lyrics, so other tunes written for the same poetic metre can be swapped interchangably. Here is a site that explains it a bit further:
My apologies for a not very clear explanation, and my thanks for the clarifying skills of GaryT and antonio107. A similar example is the two established versions of ‘Away in a Manger’ - the same text fits two quite different melodies.
Further investigation of my music collection indicates that the collection of transcriptions for solo piano called ‘Cool Jazz’ used no flats or sharps in the key signature for D dorian, and also used no flats or sharps in the key signature for G mixolydian.
In contrast, the Gabriel Fauré song ‘Lydia’ which is in F lydian, used Bb in the key signature and then used accidentals throughout the piece. Fauré is one of the few classical composers to have made extensive use of modes - by and large, most classical composers avoid them because it’s challenging to modulate to other keys while retaining the character of the modality. ‘Lydia’, strictly speaking, does not stay in the lydian mode because he still uses the Bb to form C7 chords when he feels he would like them.
That’s hardly a representative sample, but rather a first indication that there may be a difference in convention between classical and jazz publications.
