See attachment.
Is the # necessary in the second measure ? (The F was never altered on the treble clef)
Is there an option to control this. I can’t seem to find it.
using elements 2.2.0.1108.
Thx,
Open the bottom Properties panel (command 8 on Mac), and checkmark the Accidentals box; that should change its setting to Hide.
The options for cautionary accidentals are found on the Accidentals page of Notation Options. Without checking I can’t be sure whether there is an option for this specific situation, but for what it’s worth I would expect to see the F natural in the second bar and find it helpful.
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Just my two cents: sometimes it’s helpful, but sometimes it’s pointless if the harmonic context means there is no “incentive” to play another F natural.
The example given doesn’t have enough context to have an opinion on whether it’s useful or not IMO.
I think the issue here is that the cautionary rules (as described in the notes in the Options dialog) refer to “all voices,” and for a multi-staff instrument, judging by the voice colours displayed, the voices “belong” to the whole instrument, not to the individual staves of notation.
It would be nice to have an option to stop cautionary accidentals “leaking” from one staff to another for multi-staff instruments.
Personally I feel much happier adding cautionary accidentals than hiding them. If you hide them and you then edit the music, they can stay hidden even if they are no longer cautionary!!!
FWIW hand engraved published scores tend to be sprinkled with missing accidentals - and sometimes it takes a long time to notice them. I once discovered that a very well known edition of a Beethoven piano sonata had a chord of C natural, E, A, and C sharp - and I had been playing the piece for at least 20 years from that edition before I saw that the sharp was missing from the bottom C!
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Is there a way to set this as a “policy” for all instances, or does it have to be done for each event ?
(FYI, my question is simply on dorico’s mechanism, not on whether it is a good practice). I also see (#) is an option too which is nice.
thx,
Definitely. The current behavior has tripped me up a number of times, and most of those times I have ended up hiding the cautionary.
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Agreed.
(BTW, the cautionaries options I’ve set are exactly what I need for the single-staff instruments in the project, and I’d already deleted the first unnecessary accidental in the RH before taking the screenshot.)
I’m alerted to the fact that I’m making this post two years after the previous one. Has there been a change since then?
There is a setting in Notation Options for cautionaries at the octave, which should suffice.
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Of course! That hadn’t even crossed my mind because I was wrongly thinking by staff rather than by instrument. Thanks.
(Later) Now at my machine again, and I see that I had ‘Common Practice’ set for cautionaries, and every option for that category set to ‘no cautionaries’. There seems to be an option somewhere which I have mis-set, but I don’t know where it is.
I’ve experimented by temporarily deleting accidentalised noteheads in the example to see what happens to the others, and - for example - if I delete the second C natural in the RH of bar 2, the C# cautionary in the RH below it disappears; and similarly if I delete the first C# in the LH of the same bar, then the C natural accidental above it goes.
It seems to have something to do with the simultaneous occurrences of two notes with different accidentals; but, with all my cautionaries options switched off, I can’t see why that should be so. Is there an overriding option which I’ve missed?
(I’m OK with hiding accidentals, of course, so no problem.)
(Next day) Yes, this simultaneous cautionaries thing is …a thing, as I’ve found as I work my way through the score.
Got to catch 'em all!
Has anyone found a solution for this problem yet? If not, they need to implement an option to prevent cautionary accidentals across staves in a grand staff in the notation options. The behavior is simply wrong as it is now.
Still a problem, although I suspect the developers considered it a feature. It would be nice if, for example, in the properties panel, under notes & rests, accidental we could select ‘no cautionary accidental.’ It would also be nice to be able to completely turn off cautionary/courtesy accidentals. I’ve set up a shortcut to toggle accidental visibility so I can just click on the note(s) and press the key command. That’s in preferences->key commands->edit
The “rules” for cautionary accidentals in keyboard music can be complex. But some are simple. If two simultaneous notes conflict directly between the staves, as in the chordal examples above, then both accidentals are required as standard practice. However, if the chord or pattern repeats exactly and immediately, accidentals may be eliminated in the repetitions.
Many situations can only be handled on a case by case basis. In the first example in this thread. the cautionary in the second measure is a very good idea, and you would see it in well-edited keyboard music by the best publishers. However, even within measures, cautionaries are sometimes not necessary, depending on the musical situation. Only an experienced keyboard player/editor can make such decisions, which may be beyond Dorico’s capabilities at the moment, but this certainly could be rectified.
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When I started with piano playing we never had courtesy accidentals, never. I don’t think it is nor should it be standard practice. (There are always niche exceptions but not the standard and I certainly did not see it in even the best of publishers when I first started playing. It only seems to be in the past 15 years or so that everyone has to have them. Maybe the skills of musicians who read sheet music is not as high as it used to be). Every beginning piano student I’ve ever taught, when seeing a courtesy accidental for the first time immediately stops and says something like ‘why is there a natural sign? What does that mean?’ After decades of playing I still have to pause or slow down from time to time when I see courtesy accidentals (particularly those without parentheses around them). Certainly being able to turn them off should be an option. Plus it would be nice to have an option to not have them when one hand has, say a sharp and the other the natural of the key signature.
Regarding the first example cited in this post, I don’t quite understand. Don’t the properties allow you to display or hide these cautionary accidentals according to individual preferences?
Ironically, that is a question that a beginner would have, because they read note-by-note, follow rules accidental blindly, and assume that mistakes are never made in printed music. But a more experienced player reads in phrases, sees the almost exact repeat an octave higher, wonders why the repeat is not exact, and having seen wrong notes in excellent editions, wonders why the two measures don’t match. To forestall that moment of doubt, which could even lead to an interruption and question (in a rehearsal if this were an ensemble situation), composers and editors inset a cautionary accidental.
This practice goes back centuries. One sees cautionary accidentals in the manuscripts of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and the first editions of these composers. It is true that earlier composers were more canny in their use of them, and used fewer than today, and sometimes omitted accidentals accidentally. Now publishers follow preset rules slavishly and often use too many. But today’s practice goes back at least a century and a half or more.
Here are some examples by Chopin and his copyist from the Etudes op. 25 nos. 4 and 10. In the first, he uses it to forestall a question because of the parallel phrase before it. In the second we see examples across the staves and between measures.
And the second one from the Wiener Urtext edition (1975):
Note that Chopin made an error and omitted the accidentals before the last G# octave even though it is on the same staff as the previous left hand G natural. This error persisted in the first editions but is corrected in later editions like the Wiener Urtext (circled in the example) above even though the editor elected to move LH part to the lower staff.
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As John points out, cautionary accidentals are far from a recent invention, and are entirely standard and conventional in the works of the best publishers.
Here’s a Bach two-part invention (BWV 774) in the 1853 Breitkopf edition. A and G naturals, because they were sharps in the previous bar.
The same is found in the 1970 NBA edition.
Even Bach uses an A natural in his MS..!!
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It is definitely true that cautionary accidentals are nothing new, however I contend historically they were the exception rather than the standard. I have plenty of classical material from good publishers that rarely use them, if at all, and certainly not nearly as much as the “new” standard seems to be. There will always be examples one can find of them, but as a percentage of all the literature, it’s small, not nearly as much as it is used today. I don’t like them and as pianist for over 50 years who doesn’t read note by note still finds them confusing and interferes with my ability to sight read a piece.
In the Chopin examples you site, those are exactly the type I said in my OP would be the exceptions and arguably necessary in such a chromatic passage. I don’t need them in most music.
So, set your notation options to no cautionaries and save that as your as default.
No one is forcing you to show them, and you can still show the occasional accidental if required using properties.
This is unfortunately not true for a grand staff! I turned everything off in Notation Options>Courtesy Accidentals, and as you can see in my example, they are still showing across staves.
All examples in this post are from classical literature. Here’s an example from a jazz chart I am working on. In this example, there are two reasons why I would not want those courtesy accidentals:
1. The presence of chord symbols,
2. The notes with the courtesy accidentals are an octave lower.
It is hard for me to understand why we need to argue about this. Some users want it, and that should be enough reason to implement it.
So—Steinberg— I kindly request that you add this simple notation option: On/Off courtesy accidentals across staves in a grand staff at different octaves. THANK YOU!