July 07, 2015

This 4th of July I took a break from my work for a couple of hours and had a little fun arranging the Star Spangled Banner in 19ET.

After posting the result on SoundCloud with links on Facebook, some listeners expressed interest in the score, so here it is. It's written in scordatura notation, to be played on a standard MIDI keyboard retuned in 19ET (don't try playing it on a piano; it will sound completely wrong).

For those who don't know what scordatura notation is, it means that the pitches sounding are not the same as the notes written. There is however still a one-to-one correspondence between the written note and the sounding pitch. When writing in scordatura, the composer gives tuning instructions to the performer. Historically, this was done with stringed instruments, like the violin or cello. J.S. Bach even did this once or twice. For keyboard instruments, it is very unorthodox, but we can do it today with electronic keyboards that can be retuned to anything. This way, standard notation can be used to notate any tuning. The player just reads the notes and plays the keys on the keyboard according to the notes, and whatever pitches the keyboard has been tuned to will sound as the composer intended. In this situation, special care should be taken by the player when reading the score, because the experience of processing the notes on the page into music is a bit disorienting at first. One must remember that written accidentals affect only the note in the written octave, for example, because music written this way can easily include things like written augmented or diminished octaves (two inflections of the same note name in different octaves) which do not sound as such. Spellings are used for convenience, and to avoid double inflections of a given note name in different octave, although in some places better spelling choices could possibly be made (although this is a serious concern for the music I publish, I did not spend much time worrying about it for this piece, since I wrote it just for fun; if you find something that could be more clearly notated, or you think a different spelling would make more sense somewhere, just let me know and I'll certainly consider your suggestion).

Star Spangled Banner in 19ET (PDF)

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