An accidental usually only lasts until the end of a measure, but what if there are no measures? I'm writing some music without bar lines (blame Satie) and am wondering what to do about notating accidentals, and how people will read accidentals in the absence of bars. As far as I can see it there are three options:
- Accidentals last until the end of the measure. There is no end of the measure, so accidentals last forever.
- Accidentals only apply to an individual note.
- Accidentals last for "about a bar".
1 seems logical but could get confusing in a longer piece and would lead to lots of naturals to cancel accidentals. 2 could be more workable but might lead to lots of repetition of accidentals near each other. 3 would be asking for trouble.
Is there a convention for this, or do I need to explicitly state what rules I'm following?
I mainly write with pencil and paper, but I'm aware that when I come to put the score into the computer I may have to cheat and have bars with invisible barlines or something, so a rule that can be implemented easily in MuseScore and/or Lilypond/Frescobaldi would be preferable.