I was inputting this passage in a piano part, with a key sig of C, and for some reason, all these extra accidentals are appearing there. I know I could manually hide each of them, but was curious why they might be appearing and if there might be a global setting I need to tweak to stop this from happening at all. (To be clear, beat 1 is fine, but the subsequent beats in both measures have unneeded accidentals.)
Dorico is trying to make sense of the Eb/E natural in your chords.
why not simply respell the right hand chord with an Fb?
E flat vs. E natural isn’t really the issue. I do want it spelled E natural, because it functions like an augmented 5th in A flat. But I’m talking about the vestigial accidentals, like, for example, m19, beat 2 and beat 4, left hand E flats. Why are there flat signs next to the E flats in beats 2 and 4? (And a few other similar issues.)
[a previous version of this post erroneously referred to “vestigial rests” which is not what I meant]
Because you have E natural at the same point in the top chord.
If you really dislike this, you can hide the accidental in properties and forget about it.
This was your first mention of the rests but then you go back to the E flats, E Natural thing. You mentioned that you can hide them manually. There are settings for cautionary accidentals that may or may not be what you are looking for.
Did you want to hide the half rest? (I think it should be there!)
— Jim
(p.s. — Was this translated into English? — Just wondering!)
EDIT — Now that I read it again, I think “rests” was a typo (should be rest or others). Anyway, check the various options for cautionary accidentals. There may be something there to get closer to what you want.
“Rests” was a typo!! Sorry. I meant vestigial accidentals. I don’t want to hide the half rest.
It sounds like the consensus is that Dorico is adding the extra accidentals because there are E flats and E naturals occurring at the same time (although in different octaves) so Dorico is adding them automatically (although, oddly, not in every case).
I’ll just manually override them and hide them. I’m just surprised it didn’t understand it by default.
Any evidence for this?
You know, now that I stare at it, I notice it IS consistent. All the E flats and all the E naturals default to having all their accidentals, I suppose because Dorico is trying to clarify that, despite the octave differences, it’s trying to tell you that one doesn’t reset the other. If this is a known rule of music notation, I wasn’t aware of it until now.
Now that I stare at it, the others behave as I would expect. For example, in the RH, the A flats appear only at the start of each measure (which is traditionally correct). The same is true in the LH of the A flats and B flats.
It’s just some odd symmetry when you put all these factors together since every E flat and E natural is getting marked for every note.
I think I’m going to manually override this. As a pianist, in the RH, I think the RH’s E natural makes sense if it’s only stated at the beginning of each measure. (The presence of the LH playing E flat doesn’t, to me, imply that the RH should switch to E flat.) And the converse is true: in the LH I’m OK with seeing the E flat at the beginning of each measure but I don’t need it on every note.
Yes, it is (almost).
The general consensus is that an accidental only affects the notes of the same pitch on the same measure, not other notes of the same name but on different octaves or on different staves.
However, in music notation you can find all kind of situations…
Recently, working on a transcription of an early turn of the (20th) century piece for piano, I found courtesy accidentals for a note that was altered in a different octave. It did add some clarity as it was not apparently clear; the harmonic progression was changing rather quickly at that point. I would have had to stop and analyze it if it had not been there.
Now I’d like to ask – for my own curiosity is peaked (and it might be better to PM me if you care to respond— I don’t want to send this thread off in another direction) – I understand the E natural as an augmented 5th but the left hand has E flat (a perfect 5th); how does the voice leading progress? (Is the Ab/Eb acting as or similar to a pedal point?) It makes me want to see it in context! Thanks!
— Jim
If the E-natural were an F, you would have an Ab chord with an added 2nd/9th and an added 13th. Lower the F to an Fb, and one has an Ab with an added 2nd and a minor 13th.
Now (as Wagner illustrates) one can reinterpret a chord as the result of voice-leading–or one could reinterpret a series of voice-leading choices as a chord; how one visualizes a situation depends on the composer and perhaps the player interpreting the situation. Since we do not know what follows the example above, we cannot definitively answer your question how to resolve the chord or what the voice-leading should be. Such ambivalence can allow the composer many possible solutions, and one should not count on such altered chords to follow classical voice leading.
I appreciate the theory nerddom coming out in this thread! I like @Santiago-Galan’s comment that you can find all kinds of situations. In this particular piece, there is no context, as this section appears out of nowhere and doesn’t exist anywhere else in the piece. The piece is tonal-ish, but not in any particular key, so when this moment happens (and it is the start of a new section) it feels like its root is A flat, but it has a couple of extra tones in there, plus the unusual juxtaposition of E natural and E flat.
I appreciate all the perspectives; I think in this case, I will manually hide the extra accidentals, and just put the LH E flat and the RH E natural once at the beginning of each bar, and that seems clear enough to me.
Yeah, with cross relations (sometimes also called false relations) you have to show the accidentals. Here’s Gardner Read discussing them:
I’ve also seen them omitted in the case of immediate repetitions of an identical chord like in your example though. That might be a nice setting for Dorico to have.