At 4:00 AM -0500 6/28/06, Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
Lon Price wrote:
I'm working on a piece by Paganini for a client, and his handling
of tuplets got me wondering about the standards for notating them.
This piece is a theme and variations, and when he writes sextuplets
the first two show the numbers, and then he leaves them off, which
I know is common practice.
I am of the opinion that some of the "conventions" of notation are
actually typographer's conventions, dating from the period when
music was generated with handset type. Leaving off the numeral in
all but the first few tuplets might be (though I do not have
definitive information to confirm whether it is or is not) might be
an example of this. In this instance, the typographer had a
insufficient quantity of the italic numeral 6 to mark every tuplet,
and so marked just enough of the tuplets to indicate the first ones,
even if Paganini had religiously put a six in each and every
sextuplet. Similarly the use of sixteenths instead of
thirty-seconds may be dictated in this instance by typographical
considerations.
I may not completely understand the flow of technological changes,
which is why I ask this question. The "period when music was
generated with handset type," to the best of my knowledge, was the
16th and early 17th centuries. By Paganini's lifetime (1782-1840),
was music not being printed from engraved copper plates? And real
engraving, with a sharp steel implement, not punched? If so,
anything that could be engraved could be placed on the printing
plates.
My own take, having spent much of my life hand-copying music, is that
dropping the tuplet numerals once the note values and bowing have
been well established for a passage is simply a time-saving shortcut
of the kind that hand-copyists had been using for a very long time,
and are still using for hand-copied music.
I would pose a more general question: some practices, like
suppressing numerals on all but the first few tuplets, made a
certain amount of sense when other considerations came to play, but
these considerations do not apply in computer typesetting, as there
is an infinite number of italic numeral sixes, or for that matter,
an infinite supply of secondary beams, in the virtual typecase. In
such cases, it seems to me that if it makes the music more
understandable, though not at the expense of readability, that maybe
such considerations should be re-evaluated.
Of course that is true. In manuscript I used a LOT of one-bar and
two-bar (and sometimes four-bar) ditto marks, but it is child's play
today to copy the notation in those measures throughout the passage.
But that may not be the clearest way to indicate consecutive measures
with a repetitive pattern, Which brings up other decisions, when
using ditto marks: (1) Should the figure be re-notated at the
beginning of each line? (My answer, an unequivocal "NO"!) (2)
Should milepost numbers be shown every 4, 8, etc. bars of dittos,
when each bar is clearly numbered in the first place? (My answer, an
unequivocal "YES"!!)
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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