NOTATIO

That would be wonderful, OCTO. And the Finale virtual premiere could be on this Forum!

Le gibet wouldn't be as difficult as the other two. Castantets in Scarbo, harps throughout...

OCTO, I am so sorry, I got "three clarinets" in my head, failed to see the B. Cl key signature, and read your clear indications of instrumentation to see that that was exactly what you had done.

Callasmaniac's solution of 4 + 3 within the septuplet sounds like a very practical one and would help produce the effect of a gradual slowing down within the whole affair. In an actual orchestration, the final LH sextuplet would almost certainly have to be an octave lower to produce the right feelin...

Sorry I misunderstood your excellent point, OCTO., that the LH is actually nested tuplets within the RH tuplet. The measure is quite a sophisticated affair! But you got me thinking about an orchestration of Gaspard and why it hasn't been done. Unlike Chopin, it is so orchestral in feeling in spite o...

Thanks, OCTO! While Ravel loved to orchestrate his piano works, he did not orchestrate this piece or the other two in the set of "Gaspard de la Nuit." There is a certain kind of piano music that is very difficult to orchestrate, and I think that even Ravel was stumped by these pieces, whic...

The Oxford Companion to Music (1963 & 2003 editions) likewise has "three notes to be performed in the time of two", whereas the Harvard Dictionary of Music (2003) says "equal divisions". An old Grove dictionary (1954) has "three triplet notes are equal to two ordinary no...

Knut, I am not really sure that the Grove definition does take unequal divisions into account because the term "subdivide" seems to imply "divide into equal parts" with musicians; but maybe I'm wrong.

There is one remaining issue. If the notes of a tuplet are defined to be of equal length, what do we call a group like the one in the Ravel in which the notes are of unequal length? On the previous subject: I was again browsing through "Behind Bars". The wealth of information it contains i...

Thank you, Knut. That is what the first part of her definition means to me as well. It does not seem to describe the general phenomenon, but only a subset.

I am glad that everyone is enjoying and learning from this forum, the brainchild of OCTO. I certainly am.

Thanks for correcting the typo, David. I seem so prone to these that I never saw it after several re-readings of the quote. So here is the whole thing correctly quoted (I hope): "Definition A tuplet is a rhythmic division that does not divide into standard groups of two or three. Such groups ar...