NOTATIO

When I recently offered a string quartet parts newly typeset in Finale for a piece of mine they premiered in 1994 from my hand copied parts, they declined, saying they'd prefer to use the old parts. I don't think it would have taken long to transfer their markings to smart new parts, so I'm not sure...

It took several years of my pestering before they added something as minimal as a shortcut for the Clear key for Mac laptops! Puh!!!! I didn't know that it existed, I needed it so many times. And what's the key?? Shift-Fn-Delete works as clear; but that needs two hands. Is there a one-handed option?

The general view is that A is acceptable but B is not. Do members of this forum believe there any situations where B would be OK? Perhaps in a free cadenza-like passage in which exact counting/ensemble is not the point? And what about triplets across the middle beats of 4/4? I suspect I may sometime...

John Ruggero wrote: ↑15 Feb 2020, 14:37As with so many human endeavors, what starts out as spontaneous, creative and exciting eventually becomes calculated, mechanical and humdrum as the heights of human achievement are ground down to stolid mediocrity.

Ha! Yes.

An impressive explanation/dissertation as always. Thank you John for all these posts.

Any of these should result in a secco attack, varying according to tempo and dynamic. You may choose to add sec., especially when very loud, but the articulation on its own ought to be enough.

Are you referring to the sharp positions, such as :s 2 or officially more idiomatically :s II to play the G above middle C as an alternative to playing it in IV or even in VI? It's seldom necessary to mark these positions, but if there is a G you quite specifically want played in a sharp second posi...

Here are two screenshots of a bit of spoken dialogue with partial instrumental accompaniment from a chamber opera, one of the full score, the other of the vocal score. Question: despite the simple texture, it's obviously impossible for the vocal score pianist to play each of the three elements at th...

Thank you tisimst, your 2 seems to work best. Finale doesn't seem to want want to keep it there, but at least I can export a PDF without its reverting and it looks fine.

How and where should I place the dot for the dotted minim (half) F on the second beat in the piano left hand? (It's a vocal score.)