Key signature A minor as each accidental may be notated explicitly as required, or the piece may be modal or atonal. An example is Bartók's Piano Sonata, which has no fixed key and is highly chromatic. If not bound by common practice conventions, microtones can also be notated in a key signature; which microtonal symbols are used depends on the system. The common practice period conventions are so firmly established that some musical notation programs have been unable to show nonstandard key signatures until recently. The use of a one-flat signature developed in the Medieval period, but signatures with more than one
Key signature names and translations is invariably assumed to be major. In the German notation scheme, a hyphen is added between the pitch and the alteration ("D-Dur"). Minor key signatures are written with a lower case letter ("d-Moll"). For example, to describe Bach's Mass in B minor one could use: Key signature names and translations When a musical key or key signature is referred to in a language other than English, that language may use the usual notation used in English (namely the letters A to G, along with translations of the words "sharp", "flat", "major" and "minor" in that language): languages which use the