sextuplets

[David Ward]

Following on from a comment from John Ruggero here viewtopic.php?t=1243&view=unread#unread I'm wondering why I wrote different bowing for simultaneous sextuplets in violin 1 and violin 2, and then ditto in cello 1 and cello 2 in 2012 as shown in the screenshot (this is a score I'm slightly revising at present). I would have had a reason, but I'm unsure what that might have been. Possibly I was thinking of string crossing in the higher violin/cello and marked the bowing accordingly. However, in my old age (84 now) I do find myself wondering why I may have notated this in the way I did just a few years ago. I don't want to revise out something that has meaning.

Does anyone have any ideas? Should I leave it as it is?

As others have said, this site seems glacially slow at present.

[John Ruggero]

Because you actually intended two triplets? And does it really matter in this case?
The bowing looks good to this non-string player.
The distinction between sextuplets and triplets is relatively recent I think. Beethoven has plenty of sextuplets that are really two triplets.

I was just reading an interesting discussion about this by Schenker in his book about op. 109:

"It is completely wrong to assume that the sextuplet to be invariably or more probably tripartite (2 + 2 +2) and the perform it as such. Rather, it is always the circumstances that attend the given passage that must decide..." He is discussing the run in sextuplets in the first movement which appears to be a clear cut case of 2 + 2 + 2 being a series of descending broken thirds. He shows how context really determines the accentuation.

I just remembered a spot in the last movement of Beethoven's op. 2 no. 2 at the very end where he first writes triplets beamed in threes and then sextuplets beamed in 6's, but it is obvious that the triplet continue. So it is a case somewhat like MichelRE's, where the triplets really don't look right to him in threes:

op 2 no 2.4.png (861.91 KiB) Viewed 4448 times