Oh goodie. Jeremy's speaking nonsense again. Pretty typical for a Friday.
Today's Sametime Status deals more with one of my hobbies. So, all you loyal readers may or may not know that in some of my spare time, I fancy myself something of a musician. I doubt Kanye will be interrupting my Grammy acceptance speech anytime soon, but it's an amusing thing that I do when I can. Not long ago, I was forced to sight-read a new piece of music in a key signature that involved six flats. This isn't funny. It does, however, make a nice segue into a new Blag Feature I like to call "Introduction To Music Theory For Non-Musicians by Somebody Who's Not Especially Good At Music Theory."
You forgot to add "101."
Your first lesson is key signature. The key signature is a little code at the beginning of a section of music that tells you what key the piece is in, as indicated by a number of sharps or flats.
Sharps and flats, generally speaking, are the black notes on a piano. "Sharp" means you play the next black key higher than the designated note, "Flat" means one below. As you start to play, pretty much all of the notes you'll be using fall into a single scale, or "Key." If you're only playing the white notes, you're in the key of "C." If you want to move up a note to play in "D" you would need to add an F Sharp and a C Sharp to maintain the same intervals between notes in the scale (You're probably familiar with Do-Re-Mi, etc...), so a section of music written in the key of D would have those two sharps indicated in the key signature. That way, you know anytime you come across a C or an F, you're actually supposed to play the note above that. It takes some getting used to, but you get the hang of it. The image above, for the record, shows three sharps (Those little "#" thingies) and is therefore in the key of "A."
When playing new music, any key with more than 3 sharps or flats elicits cursing from the musicians and a question as to why the composer was so hung up on playing in this key rather than changing it by one note to make everyone's life easier. This is because when sight-reading (playing a piece of music while seeing it for the first time), there are a number of things to get right on the first try. You have to not only play the right notes, but play them for the proper length of time with the right volume, accents, styles, balance, while trying to look ahead to the next note you're going to play. There's often not a lot of time for thoughts of "Oh yeah...while the music says play a B, I'm actually supposed to play a B-Flat because it told me so once at the very top of the page." Generally speaking, the more sharps and flats are in the key signature, the more wrong notes will be played.
Which brings me to this new piece...one section had 6 flats. For those keeping score at home, there are only 7 notes in existence, (A through G) so every note printed on the page save one (F) were to be played as a different note. While one one hand, this makes things a little easier in that you don't have to think about what notes are Flatted and which aren't, since they basically all are, this lends itself to playing notes in ways you normally don't see them written. G-Flat is not a very common way of describing that particular note, nor is C-Flat. The end result is that I played some wrong notes during this particular section. I'm okay with that.
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