At 07:48 AM 5/15/05 -0400, John Howell wrote: >I played a concert Saturday night, and ran into something I've never >seen before. I'm wondering whether it's something that's snuck in >as, somehow, a "new notation" practice, or whether it's an indication >that the composer doesn't know how to use Finale (if that's what he >used). > >All single 8th and 16th notes were printed not with the curved flags >we are used to, but with beams going off to the right but not >attached to anything, sometimes overriding 8th and 16th rests. Beams >of different length, to boot, for 16ths and 32nds. It made >sightreading slow and frustrating, because of the mental processing >time needed to figure out measure by measure where the darned beats >were, but I must admit that by the time I knew the music it wasn't >bothering me any more. > >Just curious whether anyone has run into this, and whether there is >some way--certainly not at all obvious--in which it is supposed to be >an improvement.
I'm not positive of the answer in your case, but this is an old new music practice. :) It was in favor for a while, but has been wrestled out of favor by notation programs like Finale where it is difficult to accomplish well. I used it for a while, and occasionally still do where the graphical nature of the straight partial beams seems clearer to me (such as in the percussion part of my piece "Quince and Fog Falls"). Achieving these well in Finale is difficult, and your composer-engraver might have just given up in frustration. Beam adjustments are scattered everywhere instead of incorporated into a single tool. The beam-over-rests option and others in document options can help (though beam-over-rests has an obsessive secondary beam behavior when the rest value is smaller than the initial note's value and you've made special-tools changes), the beam extension tool helps in some cases (but only extends or reduces primary beams over mixed rests, such as 16th note + 16th rest + 8th rest where you want the 16th beam extended fully over), the broken beam tool is still broken (doesn't allow breaking single beams), some never do work correctly (such as a single flat-beamed 8th note standing alone, which can be done document-wide by changing the flags option, but not individually). And there are still things that end up require graphical additions. The obdurate "smartness" of Finale in the flag/beam department over the years, combined with the lack of a beam-centric tool, continues to be frustrating -- and may have shown up in your part. Maybe there is a way to get a standalone eighth (sixteenth...) note with broken beams instead of flags on a per-note, not document-wide basis, but I don't know it. To answer your question, yes, this is a notational practice I know of (which done with even-length beams, at least). In fact, Karkoschka describes it and gives some examples -- one is Ligeti, I think, but I don't recall which score, as he also used traditional notation. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
