NOTATIO

To nuance this a little: When you do engravings of more modernistic (or "avant-garde") music, it's like you have passed a threshold into another room. There, all kinds of made-up notations may feel relevant as an integral part of the style. But, syncopated rests, or extended beams in Bach'...

Poor musicians, when they are to make themselves accustomed to Tom Dick and Harry's individual notations! What happened to the belief in traditional notation? It may not be more right in itself, academically, but it certainly makes reading music easier, and safer, because it's more familiar - if we ...

Stravinsky's unorthodox dotted eighth rests appear already in Petrouchka (B&H), together with even more unorthodox dotted quarter rests like: 2/4 :3 :4dr ! Possibly this was motivated by his living up to the role as a leading modernist at the time. Another contemporary modernist, Schoenberg, &qu...

Thanks OCTO for a very succinct rendering of the traditional rules I would have expected to be known, if not always followed, by any composer or arranger. Here's an entertaing bonus example: Stravinsky-Schott.JPG (Schott's edition of Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks.) I take it that Stravinsky knew the b...

Our rules do change over time, often for quite practical reasons. True, of course. I hope we can agree upon this though: If you want to improve something in notational practise, it helps communicating about it if you know the traditional way you're abandoning. (BTW I don't doubt that you have this ...

So perhaps we should take some of the standard "rules" with a grain of salt. I take it you refer to the 'forest of rests' in Schenker's example? Forbidding dotted rests seems rather stiffly old-fashioned to me, so I'm with you there. I'm not in the least bothered by the combination of two...

Thanks for the examples, John. They certainly illustrate the complexity of this problem! You mentioned something about using brackets with Arnstein. Or, maybe the extended beams would help here? I'm not that keen on Solution 2, so what other options are there, besides brackets or extended beams? (Of...

But the question remains, why is odd-even allowed and even-odd prohibited when it could easily be the reverse, if the idea was to keep the two situations distinct to avoid confusion. Was it just an arbitrary decision that caught on? A possible explanation could be that it's more natural to put the ...

I had a discussion with a client who asked for the traditional sixteenth rests in A to be combined into eighth rests as in B: Combined rests 1.JPG Now, what he actually requested was the above B with extended beams, wich certainly makes the rhythm clearer than without: Combined rests 2.JPG In my eye...

The voice-exchange idea certainly is one way of looking at it. There's also another aspect to add to this - the emancipation of harmony. The dominant note (the root of V) in its cadential role, may have originated as a bass note, but is later on found in other voices as well, as a kind of 'dominant ...