The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #151012   Message #3521826
Posted By: GUEST,Grishka
02-Jun-13 - 06:46 AM
Thread Name: Minor key signatures are wrong
Subject: RE: Minor key signatures are wrong
Remarkable how easy it is to provoke angry debates among adult persons. This was obviously the intention of the OP, given the choice of nickname.

Our notation system has many disadvantages (see my post of 31 May 13 - 05:28 PM). Some of these could be mended without any drawback, were we to reinvent the system for Martians. For Earthlings, there is a "pluralistic" approach: each player or singer chooses a printout in the representation s/he likes best. In the near future, people will use their tablet computers instead of music sheets and simply switch representations as desired. (Warning: the choice is not as easy as you may think! For old music, some musicians insist on a "historic" notation, hoping to inspire them with the original aura.) —

Minor scales are a totally different topic. The way they are taught for instrumental practising covers the most typical uses in the most typical styles, thus they are necessarily incomplete. The so-called chord-scale system makes a dogma of them, hoping to get rid of the notions of key and harmonic relation altogether. Needless to say that - like most such theories - it is far from representing the corresponding music completely, thank goodness!