page_title: Enharmonic
section_title: Examples in practice
hierarchical_section_title: Enharmonic / Examples in practice
caption_attribution_description: English: Schubert Piano Sonata D960 second movement, bars 98-106
context_page_description: In modern musical notation and tuning, an enharmonic equivalent is a note, interval, or key signature that is equivalent to some other note, interval, or key signature but "spelled", or named differently. Thus, the enharmonic spelling of a written note, interval, or chord is an alternative way to write that note, interval, or chord.
context_section_description: A particularly ingenious example in popular music occurs in melody line of Jerome Kern's song “All the things you are”, where the note G sharp that concludes the bridge section repeats, over changing harmony, as an A flat, the first note of the returning “A” section. 
  Beethoven's Piano Sonata in E minor, Op. 90, contains a passage where the lowest note, B-flat, becomes an A-sharp, altering its musical meaning and significance.  The first two bars of the following passage unfold a simple descending scale of B-flat major.  However, according to Wilfrid Mellers, the B-flats here "turn out to be a pun, for they change enharmonically into A-sharps, part of a dominant ninth leading to B minor."
  Chopin's Prelude No. 15, known as the "Raindrop Prelude", features a pedal point on the note A-flat throughout its opening section.
  "The repeated A-flats ... become enharmonically changed into G-sharps in the middle section of this Prelude, and take on a brooding, ominous character."
  One of the most spectacular enharmonic changes in all music occurs in the concluding passage of the slow movement of one of Schubert's last sonatas, his final piano sonata, in B-flat, D960.  Here, in bars 102-3, the note B-sharp transforms into C natural as part of a progression, where the chord of G sharp, the dominant chord of C sharp minor, "melts with breathtaking effect into a C major chord."
caption: Schubert Piano Sonata D960 second movement, bars 98–106
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