Centered beams in Mozart's K. 330

[John Ruggero]

The following passage from the first movement of Mozart's piano sonata K. 330, presents some interesting questions. At the arrow in measure Y, he uses centered beams, rather difficult ones to draw. Yet in previous measure X and with almost exactly the same notes, he doesn't.

K 330.1 MS.png (590 KiB) Viewed 11063 times

It can't be a case of following engraving norms of the day and it surely can't be an error, because he uses the same notation twice in each measure. It must mean something; Mozart was as logical as they come in his notation as in everything else musical. But what?

Here is an analysis of the passage showing the change of harmony between the two measures in question. Perhaps that has some bearing on the issue. In measure X the E and F belong to different harmonies. In measure Y the E and F belong to the same harmony. Could that be the answer?

K 330.1 analysis.png (272.28 KiB) Viewed 11063 times

[benwiggy]

Keep 'em coming, John. This is all brilliant stuff. It really should be in a book.

[John Ruggero]

Thank you so much, benwiggy! Maybe a book, some day. I read that the figure above was viewed 1654 times in about a day. How is this possible, bots?
Sorry 1662 as of 2:23 PM EST!

[OCTO]

At the arrow in measure Y, he uses centered beams, rather difficult ones to draw.

As a composer who primarily writes all of my music by hand, I can "confess" that the writing of such beams is largely determined by the angle at which the paper is positioned relative to your hand.  This positioning makes drawing centered beams straightforward and quite convenient, and also enjoyable.  I don't know why.

So yes, I occasionally write them without any specific system or reason, and I finally let the software to determine the rule.

[John Ruggero]

That's an interesting theory, OCTO. But if that were the reason, one would see this more than once in Mozart's piano sonata manuscripts. I haven't. And I note that he seems to have planned out using these two centered beams, because he left extra room between the E flat and F sharp. Compare to the previous measure.

Also, he didn't have software to correct engraving errors and therefore had to be more careful about what he sent to the engraver, since they tended to engrave very literally in those days. All the composers whose music I have now edited, JS Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin share this characteristic. They wrote what they wanted engraved. Beethoven would sometimes even write comments to the engraver to be sure to engrave as it stands etc. Sometimes this was not possible, but the engravers did their best.

[benwiggy]

I suspect lots of engravers are 'doing their research' at the moment...

[John Ruggero]

Not quite sure what they are researching but if it is Mozart's notational practices, the manuscripts and first editions of the piano sonatas are now fairly complete at IMSLP and worth a detailed look through. One does need to be aware that some of the first editions were done after Mozart's death and edited with very heavy hands, which creates major problems for modern editions. So in some cases, later editions by Andre which appear to be much more authentic are now considered to be the better sources precisely because they conform more to the original notation.

For Beethoven see viewtopic.php?t=729 concerning Beethoven's comment in the first movement of op. 90. And there are other comments mostly clarifying the notation in other sonatas (see op. 101 last movement for a famous one.)

It is also interesting to compare Beethoven's copyist's version of op. 111 (which was sent to the publisher) with the composers manuscript. (See examples below.) In doing so we see how the copyist conformed with Beethoven's notation, even when it was not in accordance with the norms of the time. There was no attempt to correct Beethoven's notation in preparation for publication, presumably because that is the notation the composer desired. The publisher then followed Beethoven's notation as well as they could in engraved form and made a few changes to conform with prevailing norms. Some publishers honored Beethoven's notation better than others, but there is no evidence that Beethoven was relying on the copyist or publisher to "clean up" his notation, or that he felt it needed to be. Breitkopf and Haertel first editions were one of the most faithful and preserved more of Beethoven's special notational style than perhaps others. I also think that they are some of the most beautiful from that time: https://ks15.imslp.org/files/imglnks/us ... Op.81a.pdf

My general impression is that JS Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin, took musical notation very, very seriously and those around them did the same; but all were also human and made mistakes. Here is are the first pages of op. 111:

op 111 Beethoven.png (1.03 MiB) Viewed 7227 times

Op 111 Copyist.png (1.11 MiB) Viewed 7227 times