It’s time again for me to get some thoughts committed to blog concerning musical notation. When proofing a transcribed score, I tend to use a speed-reading method of comparing note position and accidental rather than the note name. Many of the instruments in a score are transposed, so if you need to identify the sounding note, the written note isn’t correct.
In this example of an incorrectly transcribed bar, we’re looking at French horns which are in F, and which sound a perfect fifth below the written note. If you wish to hear a C, you’ll need to play a written G. Anyway, although this is just a single bar example of a problematic digital transcription, there’s a lot to unroll here. I find these problems a lot. Let’s get started.
Here is the bar in question as it appears in its original first edition print. It’s canonically correct.
Here is the same bar in a downloaded MuseScore file as a digital secondary source. It has serious discrepancies from the original above.
And here is my version in Dorico, which is correct, but with two added cautionary accidentals when compared to the original.
As I mentioned there is a lot going on. First off, since the bottom stave should be identical to the top, we really need only to look/compare one of the staves for correctness, and then make the second stave the same if any corrections are applied.
Next, the first note cluster is obviously missing a flat at the G position. If we add back the flat at the G position and then look/listen to the transposed notes, we’ll find that this is a A flat Major\C chord. It’s inverted with C in the root position, but the important thing to note is that it’s a major triad. Easy to fix, this one, and a clue to what is going on with the other errors as well.
These errors all have to do with the fact that the original score is in condensed form. The triads are being played by three horns because horns are simply incapable of polyphony, unlike a piano. Each horn has its own voice, and the rules for accidentals apply to each instrument voice individually in a condensed stave.
In short, the MuseScore transcriber made the error of treating these triads as a whole instead of individual notes condensed. He wrongly followed the conventional rules of accidentals when breaking the notes out to individual instruments by reiterating them to all notes at the same staff position. When recombining them to a condensed stave though, some notes now have the wrong accidental, and some have none at all, which is a good indication that something very wrong is afoot.
In a condensed stave, the rules for accidentals apply to notes only in the same voice, and that tiny little fact changes everything! The reason for this is probably that the engravers of old took their notes for condensed staves directly from the original individual instrument staves as-is and left the reader to deal with any accidental clashes between the voices. (Music is like that, a lot… economy of notation and so on.)
If two different voices both use the same staff position (at different rhythm positions), just because one of them is either sharp or flat does not imply that the other voice is the same. It only matters to the same voice.
The other clue I mentioned earlier is that these notes appear as if they should all be inverted Major triads. Those extra sharps break that rule. Also, note that these triads move in the bar by just a chromatic step, so it’s easy to tell if they are off that way as well. This is another reason it’s important to pay attention to context when reading music.
The solution here is to use cautionary accidentals in a condensed score even though they aren’t required. With cautionary accidentals, even if someone treats the condensed stave like a polyphonic piano stave, they still get the correct notes. In the final Dorico example, we do just that, fix the missing and erroneous notes, and then let Dorico show those accidentals to eliminate any possibility of confusion that can occur when reading condensed staves.