octave line question

[MichelRE]

I have a piano part where I WAS trying to keep the material separated (right hand on upper staff, left hand on lower), but I've come across a measure where I need octave lines and can't quite figure out how to notate it.

in the image below, the grand staff shows the original material minus the octave lines. Normally, I'd have placed one above the top staff, and one between the two staves for the cross-staff notes. I know it's not 100% orthodox notation.

I'm wondering if I'm better off notating it like the upper staff, with all the notes in the top staff, and a single ottava line, with stems up and down to indicate which hand is playing?

It's a rapid figuration, not really "in tempo" sort of like bells tinkling, so it's not like I really need to indicate beats clearly here. So the upper example
(the one on the single staff) doesn't bother me as much.

I was just trying to stick to the original notation of that passage.

Opinions?

[hautbois baryton]

I really like the simplicity of the upper staff, though I would break the beams.

[MichelRE]

Hautbois: I tried with the broken beams, and it gives a bunch of two-note pairs, which I find makes the measure overly busy.
Unless I extended the beam of the "on the beat" pairs... but that looks overly fussy as well.

[John Ruggero]

Passages like that are conventionally notated so that the beaming, as well as the stem direction, shows the separate hand groups:

Rachmaninov Concerto 3.1.png (103.72 KiB) Viewed 715 times

[MichelRE]

I ended up breaking the beams, and adding the slurs that SHOULD have been present in the first version...
it seems cleaner now.

[John Ruggero]

Looks much better!

[MichelRE]

Thank-you all for the input.
Sometimes you've lived with a piece for so long, and seen it engraved in a certain way for so long, that it's hard to stand back and find better ways of doing it.

[hautbois baryton]

Looks good!

[MichelRE]

I've been trying, as much as I can, to have right hand on the upper staff, and left hand on the lower staff.
Most of the time this comes quite naturally since the registers match treble and bass clefs.

But there are these instances where everything is in a relatively high register, and it's really impossible to place one hand per staff. Even by changing the clef of the lower staff to treble, it's uncomfortably high, leaving little room for material that should normally go between the two staves.

There are a few moments here and there where I simply have to resort to placing both hands in one staff.

One entire movement, for example, has both hands in bass clef. I initially wanted to place everything on the lower staff, but moments here and there the music went back to being one hand per staff, and I find the switch from sharing a staff to independent staves a bit visually confusing.