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Exotic grace notes in Boulez

Posted: 11 Jul 2016, 20:00
by OCTO
Interesting, the point here is when the grace notes enter, and the notation picture is very clear to me; on the other hand, the main notes are missing their original values, so to speak, not of the correct duration, but it is so even with the "standard" notation.
How would you approach this in your notation software?

Re: Exotic grace notes in Boulez

Posted: 11 Jul 2016, 21:21
by John Ruggero
It is interesting to me that the notation is in "Baroque style": all the small notes start on the beat and are subtracted from the main note-values. But a Baroque composer would have aligned the main notes, which is, of course, not what Boulez wants.

I guess that in Finale, I would enter the grace and real notes as written and then move all the notes to the correct positions with the note-mover with automatic note-spacing off. But I don't think I'll actually try it… I'll wait for Dorico.

OT: As far as the engraving, the treble clefs are very nice. The brace is also good but not long enough and a little too close to the bar line. Some of the hairpins are not straight. The beats could be more clearly marked: at least in the score, there could be single, big beat numbers if the piece is conducted.

Re: Exotic grace notes in Boulez

Posted: 11 Jul 2016, 22:34
by Knut
I think I'd approach this in Finale by faking all the grace notes, i.e., entering the main notes and their preceding grace notes as tuplets, and subsequently resize the appropriate notes to grace note size, and then use an articulation shape of appropriate length and angle for the slashes. This would give you greater control over the spacing and retain correct vertical alignment.

Re: Exotic grace notes in Boulez

Posted: 11 Jul 2016, 22:45
by tisimst
I'd do something very similar with LilyPond, but there's the added convenience of manually being able to re-define the duration of any note without changing its apparent duration. For example. I can change a quarter note to actually fill the time of an eighth note simply by multiplying its duration by 1/2, but it still looks like a quarter note.

Re: Exotic grace notes in Boulez

Posted: 12 Jul 2016, 06:03
by OCTO
I don't know how it would be in LilyPond, but in Finale and Sibelius it is a pretty tricky task. The problem is that there is a defined amount of grace-notes positioned to the left (including the normal note spacing), than following by one real note which is not aligned with another real notes.
Without excessively manual moving with a great chance to get it wrong it is a very demanding task in Finale.

How about Dorico, Daniel?

Re: Exotic grace notes in Boulez

Posted: 12 Jul 2016, 11:30
by Knut
OCTO is right. After trying out my suggested approach, I can tell you that this is not possible to replicate without excessive manual spacing. The main problem is that the grace notes are spaced at equal distance, regardless of how many there are in each group. The tuplet approach, does not consider this, of course.

Keeping in mind the very clunky manual spacing features of Finale, and the buggy behaviour of TG-Tools' spacing plug-ins on smaller valued notes and tuplets, I think John's approach is far better, as it will keep the grace notes at equal distances. Any approach will require a great amount of manual work, however, so I can't imagine doing a whole piece like this in Finale.

I would suggest Asking Daniel about this problem on the Dorico forum. I'm very curious to see if this will be more approachable in that application.

Re: Exotic grace notes in Boulez

Posted: 12 Jul 2016, 12:11
by Alexander Ploetz
In Sibelius, the positioning of the notes could be largely automated with a ManuScript plug-in (by way of manipulation of the horizontal position, not the actual spacing column, which is not accessible to ManuScript). Respacing would be a constant threat to such passages, however. Also, it might turn out tricky to arrive at a suitable spacing of some the relevant spacing columns before running the plug-in.

Re: Exotic grace notes in Boulez

Posted: 12 Jul 2016, 22:03
by tisimst
Here's an excerpt of how LilyPond can handle this kind of situation. I wrote a little command to make it almost 100% automated (there are a few simple decisions to make, but it's straightforward) and safe against respacing.
exotic-grace-notes-boulez.png
exotic-grace-notes-boulez.png (37.25 KiB) Viewed 11548 times

Re: Exotic grace notes in Boulez

Posted: 12 Jul 2016, 22:51
by Knut
That look pretty great, tisimst. I think we can safely say that LilyPond blows Finale out of the water on this one.

Btw, I took it upon myself to ask Daniel about this on the Dorico forum.

Re: Exotic grace notes in Boulez

Posted: 13 Jul 2016, 02:59
by DatOrganistTho
I love how LilyPond handles it. I think I know what tisimst had to do, and it was relatively straight forward.

I have one question for tisimst, in the source, did the "grace" notes remain "grace notes" in the code, or are they modified with magstep or scale?