accidental stacking in chords

[dircknagy]

Hi all

I'm sorry if this has already been answered. I couldnt find the answer using the search function, however.

What are the rules regarding accidental placement in a very dense chord? How are they stacked?

I was under this impression:

• start with the highest note, place accidental
• the next note below which is a 7th or more away from the top note gets an accidental in the same column as the top note
• Then, go to the 2nd highest note. this accidental will be in a column to the left
• continue as before

Does anyone know if there is a definitive rule, or, is this determined by "house styles" ?

Kurt Stone doesnt say anything about this, but i'm sure its written down somewhere...

thanks!
peace!

dirck

[Fred G. Unn]

[*]Then, go to the 2nd highest note. this accidental will be in a column to the left

Generally speaking you'd place the top accidental to the left of the notehead, then the bottom left of that, then 2nd from the top, then 2nd from bottom, etc., working inward on the chord.

accidentals.png (6.81 KiB) Viewed 4885 times

If you work from the top, "then go to the 2nd highest note," it really looks odd and can take up a bit more space.

topdown.png (6.79 KiB) Viewed 4885 times

Octaves should always align though, and intervals of a 7th or more can be aligned in the same column, so more complicated situations can quickly arise. You definitely should not be working top-down moving to the left though.

[dircknagy]

thanks. that makes sense too.

[Anders Hedelin]

I found something very similar to what both of you, dircknagy and Fred, say, in Gould's Behind Bars, pp. 89-91. I don't know if I have the right to copy it here but I thought I should mention it.

An aside: Some seem to want to distance themselves from Gould, declaring that she "is not an authority". If that means you don't agree with 100% of what she says, that's a very trivial point.

[John Ruggero]

The complicated situations mentioned by Fred G. Unn and Gould can even become too much for software. Here's a dilly I just found by experiment in Dorico:

Accidentals.png (22.95 KiB) Viewed 4841 times

So one must also bear in mind two guiding principles:

Main priority: keep the accidentals as compact (in as few columns) as possible.

Secondary priority: keep the accidentals as close to the corresponding notehead as possible, with the greatest priority given to topmost note, then the bottommost note etc. as mentioned in the Fred G. Unn's rule.

[benwiggy]

The advantage of Dorico is that you can select the 'floating' accidental and set its column value directly, rather than just moving it graphically.

If you set the column to 0, then the top accidental would move to column 1 to avoid collision. (I know that's not what you would want in this instance, but it shows how Dorico works.)

[John Ruggero]

Dorico's Accidental column set to 1 one produces this:

1.png (23.18 KiB) Viewed 4819 times

So it has to be tweaked with an offset setting to achieve this:

2.png (23.06 KiB) Viewed 4819 times

Which is pretty much what Dorico gives for this:

3.png (23.25 KiB) Viewed 4819 times

The problem arises when the lower interval becomes a second:

4.png (22.64 KiB) Viewed 4819 times

In such cases, I think that chord is best broken as two (or more) two-note chords (or three-note etc.) with the "rules" applied to each part separately.