Meaning of a big slash through a note's stem and beam (contemporary works)

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Callasmaniac
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Joined: 07 Oct 2015, 17:22

Re: Meaning of a big slash through a note's stem and beam (contemporary works)

Post by Callasmaniac »

Sorry, I was probably a bit unclear. I meant composer manuscripts, where the "slashed 1/8" quite often was the way expressing 1/16-note. Your example looks engraved, not typeset, so any kind of symbol was of course possible.
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John Ruggero
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Re: Meaning of a big slash through a note's stem and beam (contemporary works)

Post by John Ruggero »

Thanks for pointing that out. Slashes were used by some composers like Mozart in their MS for ALL their individual 16th and 32nd notes, not just the small ones (note the large individual slashed 16ths in the last measure of the example as well as the other small appoggiaturas earlier):
Mozart Slashed Notes.jpg
Mozart Slashed Notes.jpg (76.45 KiB) Viewed 3409 times

However, other composers, like Bach and Beethoven used the standard double-flagged large and small 16ths in their MS:
Beethoven Unslashed notes.jpg
Beethoven Unslashed notes.jpg (112.34 KiB) Viewed 3409 times
Here the first edition of another Mozart Sonata with unslashed small appoggiaturas. One assumes that they were slashed in the MS, but the publishers understood that this was Mozart's convention for normal small 16ths and converted them to what they considered the more standard form just they would convert any of his large individual 16ths or 32nds to their normal flagged form:
Mozart Unslashed App..jpg
Mozart Unslashed App..jpg (218.39 KiB) Viewed 3409 times
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