NOTATIO

MM seems to have concluded that it can't compete with Dorico in the long run and will hold on for as a long as possible by making a few less costly improvements from time to time. Unfortunately, Dorico doesn't have everything I need at this point, so I will have to put up with Finale for a while lon...

Reading about the latest improvements seems to make Finale 26 a bust for me on a Mac, as I have never had speed issues. I will use my Finale upgrade money toward a future paid version of Dorico. It seems more likely than not that Dorico will surpass Finale in two years.

Your system sounds quite logical to me, Anders, and certainly wouldn't be confusing to players or disturb the appearance of the engraving since you carry it out consistently.

Gould has a discussion of this on page 104. (The following comments do not consider the case where a hairpin continues from a previous staff.) She says that the hairpin should start on the left side of the first note head, a practice I try to follow, unless, of course, there is a dynamic marking und...

Or just teach people to hold notes for the written duration unless expressly indicated otherwise! If musical notation were as unambiguous as a fool-proof manual, some of us, at least, would be out of work. Or, work would be a bit dull. As Anders implies, the length of a note also varies with contex...

A further complication is that one must take context into account to interpret all musical symbols, even the exact pitch of the notes themselves. This explains why, as David Ward points out, ten. can mean something different in an Italian opera and a Beethoven sonata, or as Anders Hedelin points out...

The quarter (semiminima) rest started as a reversed eighth (fusa) rest in white mensural notation, didn’t it? So it would be interesting to know when the form was first used. ...which illustrates once again why someone needs to write a book showing the evolution of every aspect of the notational sy...

As a result of which, I'm now having to research the origins of that form of rest.... You may find that the quarter rest has as many variations as the treble clef, maybe even more. I have always found it to be the most difficult musical symbol to draw by hand so that it looks like an engraved symbo...

If you let the Shenker-inspired structure-supporting notes be as important as the expressively important notes, and claim that there is just a 'skin-deep' difference between melody and accompaniment you empty the words 'melody' and 'accompaniment' of meaning. And how are we then to discuss, and und...

Just a thought: Especially the right-hand slurs of the MS (copy?) are very suggestive in that they seem to begin, not on the first eighth, but on the the first rest, or even before that - and in that they do not end conveniently at the expected 'phrase joints'. Chopin overran most of his slurs, beg...