Do people in Australia use the German notation?
One of my cousins live in Australia and whenever she writes down musical notes, she uses the German notation instead of the standard English. For example, instead of using ? (C?, D?, E?, F?, G?, A?, B?) , she writes "es" (Ces, Des, Es, Fes, Ges, As, B) . She will also write the keys in German (ex. "fis-moll" for f?-minor) . When I asked her why she writes them that way, she answered that she was instructed by someone who uses the German notation.
So the question is: Do people in Australia use the German notation?
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The German notation is not in common usage in Australia.
Source: Am Australian.
There's a lot of German influence in South Australia (the state) particularly. So there's potential for some people to use it. However, even in South Australia, I've never heard it. The average musician here tends to use a mix of British and American conventions.
The "German" notation is a notation applied in several European countries. We use it in Denmark. In this system B is called H and B? is called B. This means that you get the idea in compositions that applies the 4 notes B-A-C-H. Several composers use that sequense of notes in a composition inclusive Bach himself.
Anyway, the normal notation in Australia is the same as in other English speaking countries. I know that from an Australian musician.
Seems you've answered your own question: the cousin in question uses the German notation. Extrapolation to the population from a single instance is bad mathematics :-) . What this means is this: you know for sure that there is one person in Australia who uses German notation. You know nothing about the rest of the population. However, that is true ("know nothing") for the entire population of China, or Japan, or Paraguay. As such, your question has no functional value - it's got nothing to do with Australia per se . There is no reason to expect any country, with the faintly possible exception of Germany, has a significant number of musicians who work with German notation.
commentary
At some point, every musician (at least in the classical world) has to learn not only the standard Italian but also German and French notation (the latter being mostly the associated terminologies), how to read those crazy French scores where the eighth-rest symbols are backwards, and so on. It's the music-world equivalent of the (thousands of) different spoken languages and text characters used around the world.
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