Shortcut for adding reminder/courtesy accidental
I do quite a lot of typing out old scores into musescore for formatting, and I use the keyboard for entry.
Quite often while typing, I want to enter a courtesy accidental, that is a bracketed accidental that is a reminder that the pitch of the note has changed from what was played in the previous bar (or indeed in another part) back to the default pitch given by the current key signature.
At the minute, this is the only operation when I'm typing out a line of music that I have to switch to the mouse to do, and then it's several mouse clicks away. It feels as though it ought to be possible for musescore to both A) calculate the correct accidental (i.e. work out whether the note is sharp, natural or flat in the given key signature) and B) add a bracketed accidental in one action, which could then be assigned a keyboard shortcut.
This should act on either the currently selected note, or if you're in note input mode, the last note that was entered.
Comments
There are some unused shortcuts which seem to refer to a Plugin for adding, configuring and removing courtesy accidentals:
![Shortcuts_for_courtesy_accidentals_plugin.png]( "Shortcuts_for_courtesy_accidentals_plugin.png")
And here is a link to the existing Plugin "Add and remove courtesy accidentals":
https://musescore.org/en/project/add-and-remove-courtesy-accidentals
In reply to There are some unused… by DanielR
Thanks for this - I was unaware this existed! However, it doesn't quite do what I'm suggesting.
Two issues I have with it: Firstly, the addCourtesyAccidentals plugin - which seems completely independent of the configCourtesyAccidentals plugin - doesn't seem to have a way to parenthesise the accidental.
Secondly, both of these add courtesy accidentals where it deems them necessary - great if you just want to select a whole part or score and get it to add them for you without having to worry about it, but useless if you want to choose where (or where not!) to put them.
Consider the example shown in the attachement, say these are two vocal parts notated on the same system. In this case I'd want the courtesy accidental shown in the second part, but I'd also want one on the A in the third bar to remind the singer singing the top part. My original suggestion (look at the currently selected note, add the relevant accidental in a bracket) would allow this, but there doesn't appear to be any way of using the plugins to achieve this.
In reply to Thanks for this - I was… by technically_not
Parenthesizing courtesy accidentals is not the norm - it's only supposed to be done in special cases like when re-confirming an accidental within a single measure, or if a note appears with different accidentals in the same octave. The practice of parenthesizing all courtesy accidentals pretty much died a century or more ago. But indeed, if/when an automatic facility is designed, presumably it will give an option for the old-school method.
Meanwhile, shouldn't be hard to modify the existing plugin to behave the way you prefer.
In reply to Parenthesizing courtesy… by Marc Sabatella
Not sure I agree with that: At least in choral music where most of my experience lies, courtesy accidentals are pretty much always parenthesised (to aid distinguishing them from actual accidentals and ease mental load).
Some examples:
- Bar 1 of this piece, written in 2020: https://cypresschoral.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/SampleCP2071.pdf
- Bar 15 of this piece, als this century: https://www.ishangochamberchoir.be/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Unicornis…
Some references:
http://usermanuals.finalemusic.com/Finale2012Win/Content/Finale/Courtes…
https://phamoxmusic.com/courtesy-accidental/
Discussion on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/be9cql/whats_rmusictheory…
In reply to Not sure I agree with that:… by technically_not
I don't recognize the publishers of those. Self-published pieces, or pieces from less-established published, are often engraved by people who aren't up on intricacies of modern engraving conventions. But check instead music from major publishers, and you'll find even choral music normally skips parentheses. I will acknowledge that saying the parentheses practice "died", but just consulting a few more definitive references should convince you that not parenethesizing is much more the norm.
For a more definitive reference than random users on Reddit, see Elaine Gould's "Behind Bars", or any other modern text on music engraving practice.
In reply to I don't recognize the… by Marc Sabatella
That's a fair point on the publishers, I was at work and those were a couple of examples I could find online copies of quickly and easily. My point was more to illustrate that some people like to parenthesise courtesy/cautionary accidentals. That the plugin can't manage it at all renders it useless for those that choose to parenthesise.
That said, I'm not sure I do agree that the current norm is never to parenthesise, especially without being provided examples. Checking Elaine Gould, she writes "According to traditional practice, such accidentals are placed in brackets, to confirm that they are not strictly essential. This approach also clarifies that there is not a previously missing accidental in the bar:" ... "However, since many bracketed accidentals ... reduce overall legibility, the use of brackets is feasible only when there are just a few cautionary accidentals"
She goes on to say that "brackets force extra horizontal space between the accidental and the surround notes, which interrupts consistent note-spacing", but in choral music the limiting factor in horizontal spacing is often the lyrics beneath the notes, rather than the notes and accidentals themselves, so this argument doesn't necessarily always hold true.
Without going searching through lots of music to find examples in either direction, I'll just refer to one thing I and many other singers have been singing from a lot last month: 100 Carols for Choirs, published by Oxford University Press. The scan here shows in the first bar of the third system in the alto line a courtesy accidental that is parenthesised. https://music.gracechurchnyc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Mathias-Sir… I'm not sure which edition the scan is from, but my copy - published in 2017 - matches the scan in this aspect.
Anyway, my point is not to try and persuade anyone that parentheses should necessarily be a default option, but I am suggesting they are in use to be made an option, which the plugin currently doesn't support.
In reply to That's a fair point on the… by technically_not
You're looking at the wrong section of Gould - that's talking about cautionary" accidentals. As per the first paragraph of the section, a cautionary accidental in this context is defined as "an accidental that is repeated later in a bar, even though it is not strictly necessary". Later in the same bar - that is the exact case I said *does normally take brackets. Ordinary courtesy accidentals used in subsequent bars are covered in the previous section "Cancelling accidentals", on p. 81. As per her many examples, they are never shown taking parentheses. She doesn't even mention that as being an option, although, frankly, that seems a strange oversight on her part, since clearly the practice does exist and normally she will acknowledge that even when it's no longer followed.
I did go through a bunch of choral music before my last post found virtually all of not using the parentheses, but that was in paper scores. Online it was hard to find good examples period, as most of the major publishers don't provide sufficient samples to confirm one way or another. But FWIW, if you have a copy of the Norton Anthology of Western Music handy (I have the fifth edition), in the first several examples I checked, none used parentheses (and these are reprints from different publishers). See for example the reduction of Bizet's Carmen and Wagner's Tristan & Isolde, or the full scores for Verdi's La Traviata or Mendelssohn's Elijah. You can check any of those against corresponding IMSLP editions. I also have a Schirmer book of arias, no parentheses there either. And this is all music over 100 years old. I'm not saying parentheses are never used, just that it really is not the standard.
Anyhow, the "configure courtesy accidentals" plugin does provide that option. However, the plugin framework is a bit messed up at the moment and the UI isn't functioning as it should, so you might not be seeing the checkbox. I'm not sure how to fix that, but it would be pretty simple for someone sufficiently motivated to copy the corresponding code to the "add courtesy accidentals" plugin.
And yes, more automatic and more built-in support for all of this would be nice someday.
In reply to You're looking at the wrong… by Marc Sabatella
Ah fair enough, I confess I hadn't realised there was a distinction between cautionary accidentals and courtesy ones. Unfortunately I don't have direct access to the book, only through a friend who I asked to send me anything relevant he found, hence missing the relevant section. Much of the music I sing is from the smaller publishers or self published, which is partially why I end up re-typing up a lot of it, but also perhaps why I have seen a lot of these bracketed accidentals. For my money (worth very little I appreciate), especially when sight singing, I find the bracket very useful.
For anyone who's stumbled across this, firstly well done for reading this far. Secondly, turns out the addCourtesyAccidentals plugin within the code does have an option to parenthesise things but it is (at least in the current version 4.2 that I am using) hidden within the code. To change it you will need to edit the plugin by changing the "useBracket" property to 1.
Having said that, the plugin still doesn't do what I want it to, I want to be able to tell MuseScore exactly where to add a courtesy accidental, so I've written https://musescore.org/en/project/naive-courtesy-accidental-adder which simply adds a courtesy accidental to the currently selected note. Doesn't handle chords or multiple selections at the minute, but it can be assigned to a shortcut to speed things up.
In reply to Ah fair enough, I confess I… by technically_not
Awesome! I've always thought such a plugin made sense - thanks for taking it on!
Regarding the Gould, here's the relevant excerpt:
BTW, the courtesy/cautionary terminology isn't at all universal, and she even uses the term "courtesy" in the cautionary section. So instead of worrying about the "correct" terminology, better to just know the conventions themselves - within a bar (almost) always gets the parens in the following bars normally not but some editors do choose to for whatever reason. Within the bar does usually get the parens, but not in atonal music that uses the convention of adding accidentals to all notes.