Stemlets on rests
How do you put stemlets on rests?
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How do you put stemlets on rests?
| Attachment | Size |
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| stemlets_example_with.png | 12.42 KB |
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Comments
See: https://musescore.org/en/node/11370
Adding stemlets almost makes sense where the beam starts or ends on a rest - though I don't remember seeing such stemlets in published music. However Elaine Gould in her notation guide Behind Bars certainly shows the use of stemlets (see "Extending beams to cover whole beats", pp.165-166).
You can fake the stemlets by adding notes high up the stave, then making the notes silent and the noteheads invisible:
![Beam and stem over rests.png]( "Beam and stem over rests.png")
In reply to Adding stemlets almost makes… by DanielR
That helps! :)
In reply to That helps! :) by TheBlockofSwis…
Hopefully, there are not too many stemlets. Some elements need to be positioned manually.
I added the stemlet rests in voice 2. Voice 2 allows all unneeded rests to be deleted.
See:
stemlets1a.mscz
Use menu item: View > Show Invisible to see the invisible notes.
EDIT: Forgot to make invisible notes silent. Correction attached.
In reply to Adding stemlets almost makes… by DanielR
Not that anyone should care what I think. But for my own piece of mind, I have to say that, to me, stemlets make no sense at all. And the beams extended over the rests in the second half of the example don't seem to serve any purpose. Why do we need more than the rests?
In reply to Not that anyone should care… by bobjp
"Why do we need more than the rests?"
I can only quote Elaine Gould (Behind Bars on p.165):
"Beams may extend across rests that start or finish a beat, in order to clarify the position of a beat. Stemlets (stems that stop short of the rest) mark the position of each rest, and inner beams are then extended or attached to these stemlets."... and to support your view, on p.166:
"Use extended beams only when it is essential to help the reader to identify the beats. Elsewhere, use tradional beaming, since otherwise the extra notation makes straightforward rhythms look unnecessarily complicated."In reply to "Why do we need more than… by DanielR
“Unnecessarily complicated” is spot on! I think the OP’s example is horrendous- imagine trying to sightread that. Perhaps some people are used to it but I’ve never seen it before, nor want to again…
In reply to “Unnecessarily complicated”… by Brer Fox
Agreed. I use MuseScore for composition. I would never notate anything like the examples in this thread because they are unclear or unnecessarily complicated.
In reply to “Unnecessarily complicated”… by Brer Fox
Disagree. I think that the OP's example makes a good case for stemlets. The example would be even clearer if the rests were hidden since the stemlets convey this information already. However, this would probably not become acceptable practise until enough composers used such a convention for some period of time.
See also #100111: stemlet (stems over rests)
I am craving stemlets over rests SO HARD. Is there any hope for them without having to navigate the workaround?
In reply to I am craving stemlets over… by johnpickfordr1
I think that there is hope.
DanielR's workaround could probably be automated via a plugin. You would need to think of a means of detecting such hidden, silent notes so that they are not doubled each time you run the plugin. You could put them all in an unused voice or add a hidden stave text to flag them as stemlets. This detection would also be useful for implementing a "Remove Stemlets" function. (It would be possible to detect hidden, silent notes at the same segment tick as rests and assume that they are stemlets).
I'm don't know whether the notehead's visibility can be toggled independently of the stem via the plugin API but you could test this.
In reply to DanielR's workaround could… by yonah_ag
This relic’s instinct favors the old notation and finds cantilevered beams jarring and ugly, but 4/4 bars with 8 16th-note rests each followed by a 16th note or a pair of 32nd notes do look a bit forbidding, and there’s a lot to be said for beaming them in quarter-note chunks. (I’m looking at the inner parts of the third movement of the Mozart g-minor string quintet). When I started using MuseScore, Gardner Read’s notation book was the bible (Old Testament? King James version?); under “Modern Innovations” he says (2nd edn, 1979, p93), “Once the eye has become accustomed to the sight of extended beams, the sense and logic of such a practice will be apparent.” And he is not an easy sell: his next paragraph deplores “modern devices that appear to have little justification beyond sheer novelty”, with an example by Pierre Boulez. I see even more logic to giving each rest a stem, rather than a stemlet, and I think it would be easy to read once you got used to it, but logic isn’t everything in music. At least in my limited circle (2 people), beamed rests and stemlets have carried the day.
In MU 4.2, with staff space 1.75, a vertical slash in 15 pt Eras Light ITC makes a nice stemlet of appropriate size and can easily be pasted on every beamed rest. (Other fonts would no doubt do. I have “Match staff size” on, but I don’t know if it matters.) Much adjustment is then required; I’m not the one to advise on that, but it is not hard. (A vertical-slash stemlet can be adjusted up and down in tiny increments by the arrows which share PgUp and PgDn on my Windows 11 keyboard.) I think the result looks quite nice, charming even, sort of like rococo décor. I strongly suspect that I would find adding an extra voice with hidden notes much more cumbersome and dangerous. It is natural to put the stemlets in the parts; if you let them appear also in the score, they will be misplaced and beyond rococo to clutter, but if you select them all in the parts, check “Exclude from score”, and press Enter it will be done.