#WTAF #Carus: #courtesy #accidentals

In my personal house style, courtesy accidentals mandatory have parenthesēs around them (in vocal staves) to be anle to distinguish them, at a glance, when speedily sight-reading, from accidentals that actually change the #pitch. This is to avoid overshooting into the wrong direction.

I get that this is not universal, and even #Gould recommends to not do that (probably because professional #engraving is mostly considerate of publishers’ desire to keep the amount of needed paper (= the cost) down) but permits it.

However, these courtesy accidentals are utterly ridiculous, make the passage actually harder to read, and should not be there: this is open score (four-stave) SATB, not closed score (two-stave two-voice-each), though I would recommend against most unparenthesised courtesy accidentals even there, and it’s not the piano excerpt (where they make sense).

Plot twist: these here (if I got the right location when capturing the photo quickquickquick before running after my #FediCats doing things they shouldn’t in the garden again; if not, then an extremely similar location) actually don’t make sense because the #natural there does not have a corresponding #flat in any of the preceding #measures in any of the vocal staves. 🤦

It certainly lends more credibility to my theory from the preceding post: unexperienced/undereducated (second paragraph) piano-but-not-vocal (first paragraph) #engraver.