While sight-reading the famous 1st movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, I came across a notation that left me stumped.
The piece is in C-sharp minor, so it has four sharps, namely F♯, C♯, G♯ and D♯ but at one point, F goes double-sharp, then in the next measure, it becomes F♮♯. I had absolutely no idea how to play this. Did it mean that F is natural but the other three notes remain sharp ? The opposite ? Something else ?
It turns out that it’s an old way of indicating that you go back to the original F♯. OK, I guess it makes sense when you know it, but I found it definitely confusing. In the more modern practice I’m familiar with, you just write F♯ and that’s it.
Have you ever come some unusual musical notation that you had no idea how to decipher ?
I can’t remember what it’s called, but there’s a traditional (neither today’s usual musical notation nor the use of numbers for notes common in China) way of notating the music for the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean zithers.
I must have been reading fairly old music, because the way you first wrote it, with the natural and then accidental, is the way I’m most familiar with.
Yes, there has been all sorts of musical notation that has flummoxed me over the years, but no concrete examples are coming to mind this early in the morning yet.
Our high school production of, “Jesus Christ Superstar,” had an interesting notation: during the crucifixion scene, in the minute or two before Jesus’ final lines, the score says (and I quote), “Goof around.” Gotta love it.
From what I read up about this, that is indeed the case. That’s just traditional notation. Contemporary notation to change a double sharp into a regular sharp would be to simply indicate the sharp.
More info here under “double natural”:
Similarly, to cancel one flat or sharp from a double flat or sharp, the traditional convention is to use (♮♭) or (♮♯) respectively, but the naturals are generally omitted in modern notational practice.
By “modern” it states somewhere around the 19th century.
From Frank Zappa’s “Piano Introduction To The Little House I Used To Live In”; score transcribed by Ian Underwood (who performed the original recorded version), published 1970’s IIRC. Link is SAFE for work.
Trills and mordents in Renaissance guitar (before the guitar had six single strings). They’re more or less what most modern guitarists would call hammer-ons and pull-offs, and they’re represented by symbols in the really old scores.
It’s not really that unusual, but I remember the first times coming across tremolo notation in a piece of piano music and having no idea what it meant.
Either like this:
or like this:
I could not for the life of me figure out what that bottom type of notation meant, before I asked my teacher. (A lot of times I see the notation with the three (or however many) horizontal bars disconnected.)
Well, it goes to show that I’m less musically well-read than I thought.
One reason may be that I have few Urtext scores. For public domain music, which represents 90% of what I play, I’ve almost always relied on free scores found online, and these tend to be recent.
I just looked at a popular program for (semi-)automatically engraving music, GNU Lilypond. There are about a dozen predefined styles for automatic accidentals, but, interestingly enough, the default corresponds to “eighteenth-century common practice”. If you want the modern style you have to specify that explicitly.
Oh, K364y boy… 
