Should have guessed as much. Very sloppy indeed.John Ruggero wrote:1. Strange stemming: the extra stems are for the English translation. Durand did the two-language version first and then just omitted the English text for the all-French version, leaving these vestigial remains behind. Very sloppy, Durand. Ravel had nothing to do with it.
http://petrucci.mus.auth.gr/imglnks/usi ... 5score.pdf
Even though it might by obvious, this still falls into the the 'bad' category for me. A simple quarter rest wouldn't really clutter up the notation, and, to me at least, it would be more instantly comprehensible.John Ruggero wrote:2. Measure 4: this is probably "experimental" impressionistic piano notation. They were trying a lot of "cool" things with notation, some good and some bad, just like composers today. Quarter rests are omitted for the upper parts as "obvious" given the meter and voice part that makes the rhythm absolutely clear. Simplifications like this are the bread and butter of keyboard notation in general, which tends to be creative given the desire of the best composers to keep the notation as simple as possible.
I actually didn't think about the time signature change in the russian version, so thanks for pointing that out. An alternative would be to add a dot to the quarter note instead, but I agree that as long as Ravel wrote it that way, there needs to be a very good reason for changing it.John Ruggero wrote:3. measure 6: A 5:6 tuplet seems pretty tame to me, especially in this day and age! This certainly cannot be an error, since it took a lot of trouble to notate it this way. The quintuplet encourages a more free playing of the measure with a kind of folk-like hold on the D#.
The Russian version actually changes the meter from 3/4 to 2/4 to make the change from a 1/4 to an 1/8 note work! Unless the measure was revised this way by Ravel, it should be left as it stands.
While I agree that a quintuplet in itself isn't very exotic, my reaction, like OCTO's, was that this one seemed out of place and overly complicated in it's context.