Exotic grace notes in Boulez

[OCTO]

I have to agree with John.
Lining up grace the grace-notes is not present in the Universal Edition's print, which is obviously hand engraved. It is Boulez's "Derive".
The obvious problem is that musicians tend to think that these notes must be played together, I completely agree.
Even if not, than there are some spacing problems:
In Boulez's example, he uses accidentals for each note. That makes easier to keep spacing, but if we have one note that is on the ledger line, that note has additional spacing which affects notes which are not placed on the ledger lines, thus spacing is extended even for those notes.
It would be great to be able to see Boulez's manuscript.

Anyhow, this example is tricky, yet very beautiful!

[Knut]

Knut wrote:

I think you're right about that, but since grace notes simply should be spaced as close together as possible by default, lining them up (more or less) exactly makes sense. This also contributes to a more pleasing result, aesthetically.

At first, I was inclined to agree with you, but then thought more about it. Lining them up, if that is what we are trying to do, may give a misleading impression to the performers. I think that it is significant that the notes don't line up in the original.

Thats a good point, and truth be told, I'm not really advocating for a more perfect alignment than what's exhibited in the score. The key thing for me is to replicate the minor variations in horizontal placement of the main notes. The grace notes, on the other hand, should ideally be spaced as tightly as possible, according to convention, regardless of whether they line up or not.

As faking the grace notes by using ordinary 32nd notes of reduced size in combination with relatively complex tuplets would force alignment at the outset, as well as create spacing issues with the primary notes. Unless anyone can come up with a method of retaining the main note variations, while at the same time keeping the grace notes 'true' to the software, I think I'm inclined to go by your original suggestion. Since every method suggested thus far seems to entail extensive manual re-spacing in one way or another, this seems to me to be the most straight forward, easiest way to get what I want.

Or I would just wait for Dorico.

According to Daniel, Dorico will not have any support for this in the first version, but might in the future, until which time notes would need to be manually offset to replicate this kind of notation. As I understand it Dorico is better set up for this kind of thing than both Finale and Sibelius, since grace notes are much more connected to their main notes in the underlying architecture. This development diary entry has more on the subject of grace notes in Dorico: http://blog.steinberg.net/2014/12/devel ... part-nine/

[John Ruggero]

OCTO. wrote:

It would be great to be able to see Boulez's manuscript.

I was thinking the same thing, OCTO. The MS would tell us everything.

Knut wrote:

According to Daniel, Dorico will not have any support for this in the first version,

Thanks for checking with Daniel, Knut. Actually, I would have been shocked if Dorico could do this, since it is such a rare notation, but the product seems to have unsuspected powers that makes one wonder. On D-Day, we may all be shocked, hopefully in a very positive way.

Unless anyone can come up with a method of retaining the main note variations, while at the same time keeping the grace notes 'true' to the software, I think I'm inclined to go by your original suggestion. Since every method suggested thus far seems to entail extensive manual re-spacing in one way or another, this seems to me to be the most straight forward, easiest way to get what I want.

I am certainly not in love with my original suggestion and might combine the two approaches as I mentioned. Fortunately, I will never have to deal with this. Never.

[Knut]

OCTO. wrote:

It would be great to be able to see Boulez's manuscript.

I was thinking the same thing, OCTO. The MS would tell us everything.

+1

Fortunately, I will never have to deal with this. Never.

Hopefully, I won't either.

Actually, I'm not completely clear on why this kind of notation was chosen at all, assuming, of course, that the MS reflects the engraving. If I were to write something like this, I would almost certainly use tuplets based on the total duration of the primary notes, rather than grace notes with primaries of full value. In my mind, this would both make the rhythms more visually correct, as well as make the spacing much easier to handle. But perhaps I'm misunderstanding something about Boulez's intentions?

[John Ruggero]

Knut wrote:

Actually, I'm not completely clear on why this kind of notation was chosen at all,

In listening to Derive 1 on YouTube, it seemed to me that such patterns were played as fast as possible and somewhat lightly. So the notation does make sense.

[OCTO]

A solution in MuseScore2:
Small notes are entered as grace notes. The main notes are moved to the left to match the start point. Here grace notes are not aligned! MuseScore keeps spacing firmly, everything entered after doesn't affect spacing on the left.

shot 8.png (34.62 KiB) Viewed 12787 times

[John Ruggero]

Excellent. Score another one for MuseScore! OK. I am going to take another look at MuseScore, OCTO.

[OCTO]

It was pretty easy to get this!
Enter the main note, enter the grace notes and just offset the main to the left and the grace notes move together. The offset remains fixed.

[Knut]

As I understand it, this is similar to how it will work in Dorico as well.

OCTO, in case you didn't know, manually adjusted notes will stay put in Finale as well as long as you deselect automatic spacing of seconds, and select Incorporate Manual Positioning in Document Options.

[OCTO]

Automatic spacing of seconds? Why that?