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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:

1. Accidentals last until the end of the measure. There is no end of the measure, so accidentals last forever.


2. Accidentals only apply to an individual note.


3. 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.

Your #2 thought is the convention. Yes, this means you'll need to write lots of accidentals. That's okay. Contemporary players, especially those who regularly perform new music are used to reading lots of accidentals. A fair number of people (including myself) actually prefer reading accidentals over key signatures.

In addition to writing in every accidental, you'll need to include a note in the score / parts above that section saying "accidentals only apply to single pitch" as well as a note in the front matter detailing the same thing. I would also include a lot of courtesy accidentals as well, just to make sure everything is super clear.

There are two basic conventions.

The "second Viennese school" (Berg, Schoenberg, Webern, and their followers) chose to write every note with an accidental, including every note that has a natural.

That is not so bad for monophonic instruments, but it usually looks a mess for polyphonic notation.

The "modernist" or "neo-modern" convention is that an accidental applies to all notes that are immediately repeated at the same pitch. If any other note intervenes, the accidental is shown again.

The second Viennese school convention has the advantage that it is easy to proof read hand written music. Any note with a missing accidental is a mistake, and every note has an unambiguous pitch.

The big problem with the modernist convention is that most computer notation software doesn't support it automatically, and therefore you can "break the rules" but still get the correct computer playback. In practice it is advisable to add plenty of cautionary accidentals, to avoid wasting lots of rehearsal time getting everybody to play the right notes.

Lilypond supports a wide range of different convention for accidentals, including both of the above. See http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/displaying-pitches#automatic-accidentals.

The option that accidentals last "about a bar" is fairly useless, unless the music is such that everybody reading the score will have the same idea about the length of a bar - and in that case, writing the barlines isn't going to give anyone a misleading idea about the music, so just write them! You can have bars of unequal lengths with no time signatures, if you like.

An accidental lasts for as long as it does. At the point you need to cancel, write a natural sign. That then lasts until it's no longer needed. Then another accidental comes out to play.

There's no need to mark every note - which presumably will be a natural in its normal state. The problem for you may be that you notice loads of F♯s, for example, and at that point start thinking ' this could be marked in the key sig...'