NOTATIO

Another question about your first example. Now and then I get older manuscripts to work with, where composers obviously use slurs instead of brackets for tuplets, in the old way. Sometimes they are broken, sometimes not. When not, the slurs are not always that obvious: are they just "tuplet slu...

Doesn't it look more like a badly placed 2? (Left bottom "corner".)
Badly placed or perhaps a little too small.

John Ruggero wrote: ↑18 Nov 2023, 17:31 Beethoven would have loved it...

Not to mention Schubert. Most likely he'd written 10 symphonies if he'd had that.

I can't let go of the question of long or short chord breakings. As I understand it, OCTO, you prefer Szeryng's smooth and almost simultaneous chords, but I'd like your opinion about what's often heard in Bach performances. Take fx. this beginning of the first solo violin sonata by Bach: Bach multi-...

I think the question how to notate the difference between a rather fast, unaccented beginning of a broken four-stop on a string instrument, and a more accentuated one, remains unanswered. John's comparison, interesting as it is, doesn't say much about string notation. While four-stops, notated as ch...

I'll go with Michel here. For a score of this size, tempo indications at the top only seems good enough to me. In every part there'd be tempo indications anyhow. No one would risk missing anything. The space problem might possibly be resolved by further diminishing the size of the staves, and draggi...

David Ward wrote: ↑27 Oct 2023, 15:39 [About Berg's Wozzeck] ... there was a score in the music library at the boarding school I was at, although I suspect that if the staff had studied it they might, in those days at least, have blocked my access to it.

!! I'm glad they didn't.

The point I'm making is that there probably is a psychological difference in notating and/or playing with or without a key signature. Possibly this isn't the kind of psychological difference you had in mind, David, but anyway I found this example of a key signature in an othertwise no-signature con...

Key signatures, if used, aren't just to minimize accidentals but to convey a tonal center. ... I always use a key sig that conveys the actual tonal center, whether major or minor, and then show the mode by using accidentals. Perhaps that's more appropriate in music with a more stable tonal center? ...

Thanks for your extensive reply, Fred! I have a question, though. As I understand modal key signatures, in fx E Dorian there would be two sharps etc. Now, wouldn't a key signature with F sharp and C sharp be quite unproblematic, regardless of which scales and harmonies there are? Or, have I misunder...