NOTATIO

So, I'm attempting to write a bariolage passage in a work, and have my doubts about whether it is comfortable to play or even possible. I mean, I can play the notes myself on my viola, but since I'm a very raw beginner, I obviously don't have the technical skill to actually achieve a bariolage effe...

Beautiful work, swetom2011 ! So clear and nicely balanced. Way to go.

If by "forced apart" you mean not required to all be a standard distance from each other, I couldn't agree more. Many publishers feel compelled to make piano systems as uniform as possible, but I think that does a disservice to the people who'll be trying to read them. I'm sure I needn't c...

Hi John – I'm not sure I'd read quite so much into this. In my experience, composers are rarely notation specialists (nor should they need to be). Who knows why Ludwig used a centered beam? If he felt it was important to express the passage of a musical idea from LH to RH, a much clearer, more conve...

AFAIK, the slurs actually indicate a glide from one note to the next, and are thus a specific part of the performance rather than gratuitous phrasing. That said, I think longer phrase-oriented slurs are rarely worth the clutter in vocal music; a good director will often provide that sort of guidance...

Hi DePaule , If you're still interested, I can offer a few (good-natured!) suggestions: • Consider beaming over your rests, as I think it's easier for performers to count notes as beamed units rather than singly. In 2- and 4-based time signatures, you won't want to beam more than two beats; but in 3...

Neither! I've listened to it several times, and I hear B, G#, D#—in other words, a G#m/D# chord.

Maybe it's just me—but I'd use a dotted 1/4 rest only in signatures whose beats were grouped in threes, such as 6/8 and 12/8. In that case, it's obvious that a dotted quarter represents one beamed group of eighth notes. Make sense?

MichelRE : I think it would've helped if you'd mentioned the circumstances of what you were doing. Were you hired to do this notation? If so, I'd good-naturedly offer the client my advice, then be prepared to accommodate them if they stuck to their guns. If I were preparing music for a group I play...

Hi everyone – Like most of you, I imagine, I prefer to place fingering above or below notes, rather than beside them, where they compete for space with the notes. However, I often run into this kind of thing, in two-voice keyboard music with tuplets: https://i.postimg.cc/Dz3yG1gk/triplet-fingering.p...