It’s written A𝄪, or Ax. And it very much does exist.
Granted, I can’t think of when a Ax would be necessary, as double sharps usually happen for the raised sixth and seventh scale degrees. Fx will show up in G# minor, for example.
Careful…now that you brought that up, this thread could keep going past two thousand posts… 
I’m assuming his post is being facetious and referencing that. If not, see BigT’s response.
Ahh, got it.
You said it yourself – so-called “double sharping” is not necessary. And in music, nothing exists that is not absolutely necessary. It’s a matter of simple logic and common sense.
I see Ax in Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”, Book I, Fugue No 3 in C# minor at measure 22.
And stuff like double flats and double sharps make sense, if you’re used to them. Take the chord A-flat minor, for example. It can be notated as Ab, B (natural), Eb. But on the staff, that just looks weird to me, because for major and minor triads, I am expecting a shape with three notes neatly stacked on top of each other (So three notes on consecutive lines, or three notes in consecutive spaces.) If you write it out as Ab, B natural, Eb, you get this weird shape that it looks like the first two notes should have an interval of a second between them. Add to that that you now have the issues of having a key with two different Bs, one flatted and one natural, it makes more sense to me and is clearer and less messy to have a B flat and a C double flat.
What does “tonal” mean in this context?
Ack! That should be C# major. (ETA: You can actually see it here.)
I didn’t say it was unnecessary. I said I can’t think of a place where Ax is necessary. It is very necessary in G# minor.
And only now did I look up and see it was a whoosh. Good one Frylock. Totally unexpected.
(Not that that confusing post above would have helped if it weren’t.)
Seeing that is one place where I would actually agree with Frylock’s mythical person. There are so many double-sharps that I would have definitely changed to a flat key. Heck, I may have even written the whole thing in Db major.
Well temperament may not be the same as equal temperament, but it does mean the enharmonic notes are exactly the same. It was only before well temperament that Ax would be close to but not quite B. (I believe it would actually be slightly higher, though.)
You clearly just mean C flat here.
It means to have a definite musical key. You know, like being in G major or Bb minor. Atonal music gets rid of any recognizable key.
Check out the Wikipedia article on tonality for more. Or, if you have the time, listen to Vi Hart’s video on serialism, which includes examples where she used an atonal system called serialism to alter popular old children’s tunes. The funny one is how normal it can sound if you make it jazz.
(Serialism, put simply, is where you are not allowed to reuse a note until you’ve used all 12. Playing the same note multiple times in succession and going back to the previous note are allowed, but that’s it.)
You clearly just mean C flat here. I think you meant to talk about G-flat minor and Bbb.
Yeah. Um… I mean C flat. Um. Need more caffeine in my coffee. I confess I wasn’t immediately thinking of G-flat minor, but I would have eventually gotten to it to make the same point, if I had not been suffering a major brain fart. This is apparently what happens when you have a four-month old in the house: you lose half your brain cells.
Sure, but the question is, I think, what does Moe mean when he says most rock/pop music is not strictly tonal. I mean, I have some ideas what it could mean in terms of ambiguous tonality and the such, but I’d still call most (if not all) popular music clearly tonal. I guess it all hinges on what is meant by “strictly.”
Maybe he was referring to blue notes, which as you know tend to bend and so spend much of their time between, say, a minor and a major third…and this is the basis for the blues, of course, and therefore much of rock, and finds its way even into hip-hop and some popular dance music.
All entirely “tonal” in the sense of each song having a pretty clear (or very clear) key and pretty clear (or very clear) chords, but with some “atonality” in that some of the notes (especially when sung or played on a “lead” guitar) aren’t clearly one of the twelve semi-tones of standard Western music.
(see Gerald Kubik’s book “Africa and the Blues” for where this came from…but that’s another story)
Yeah, that’s part of what I had in mind that could be meant. That, and also the prevalence of “power chords” which are neither major nor minor (but perfect fifths), although often there is an implied tonality.
Yeah, that’s part of what I had in mind that could be meant. That, and also the prevalence of “power chords” which are neither major nor minor (but perfect fifths), although often there is an implied tonality. But, yeah, if all that is meant that some notes stray outside 12 tone equal temperament, yes.
Ah. I stupidly didn’t look back up to see the context of Moe’s quote. And Acsenray sounds like he’s just learning music theory and might not know about tonality.
I do agree that he’s probably defining “strictly tonal” as “staying in the same key, unambiguously.” He’d probably even count a Im7 as not “strictly tonal” because it’s technically a V7/IV. Blues notes are an intriguing possibility, too. Power chords don’t really fit, though. It’s not like the I5 chord doesn’t exist in classical (and earlier) harmony, too.