Tremolo appearance (for piano)
I'm using Gardner Read's book ("Music notation") as a reality check on my own memory. In the attached sample, please ignore bar 1, which is an artefact of the fudgification, then he shows the expected form of a tremolo as in bar 2. (Read, pp. 236-7; scan if required) But Musescore only seems to provide the thing shown in bar 3, with shortened beams, and worse, unless you manually flip the stems the thing in bar 4, which looks very odd to me and nothing like it appears in Read. Is the first form available?
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Sorry! There does not seem to be any way of editing a post once made, so please use this version.
I'm using Gardner Read's book ("Music notation") as a reality check on my own memory. In the attached sample, bar 1 shows the expected form of a tremolo as in bar 2. (Read, pp. 236-7; scan if required) But Musescore only seems to provide the thing shown in bar 2, with shortened beams, and worse, unless you manually flip the stems the thing in bar 3, which looks very odd to me and nothing like it appears in Read. Is the first form available?
In reply to Sorry! There does not seem… by Imaginatorium
The method used by MuseScore is the first example quoted by Riffero (Copista di Musica Digitalizzata, p. 61) but stems must have the same direction.
He also indicates those that you mentioned.
(just for another point of view)
In reply to Sorry! There does not seem… by Imaginatorium
Imaginatorium's first measure is what I see in ALL printed classical music for all instruments. Tremolos are always beamed. It's a shame MuseScore doesn't support this form. I don't remember ever seeing measure 2 style in print. Measure 3 style should never be displayed. MuseScore should make some decision and keep the stems pointed the same way, even of the user flips one of the stems.
In reply to Imaginatorium's first… by mike320
Although Mike320's suggestion seems about right, in addition there's something similar (not quite the same) to measure #3 that can be used and looks decent, but it involves cross-staff beaming. An example of this has been taken from lilypond's documentation (http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/notation/short-repeats) and shown here:
Peace & P.S., FWIW, count this as another vote for measure #1's form as an available standard option within Musescore.
In reply to Imaginatorium's first… by mike320
I guess I should modify my assertion that measure 3 should never be displayed and say that tremolo beams should follow the same rules as non-tremolo beams with the same edit options.
In reply to Imaginatorium's first… by mike320
There are three different styles in common use - unbeamed, partially beamed, and fully beamed. The partially beamed style is perhaps best suited for cases where the note value is half note. The fully beamed style is especially common in piano music, but the unbeamed style is in my experience more common in music for wind and stringed instruments. Gould shows and allows for all three, showing an implied preference for either fully unbeamed or partially beamed, but not making a big deal about it.
In reply to Sorry! There does not seem… by Imaginatorium
A bit more about this. I think the tremolo "between notes" is actually rare in piano music, but extremely common in the piano reductions of orchestral works which were the only way ordinary people got to hear many classics until the second half of the 20th century. But I made a transcription of some nutcracker, which is why I used it. And MS ver. 2 is a huge improvement over ver. 1 (I was doing this in 2011)
Just did a bit more research: as I remembered, all the German and English editions of Beethoven symphonies and the like for piano duet use "fully beamed" (Marc's terminology); but Russian editions (going back a long way) and an Alfred arrangement of Gershwin (1933) use "umbeamed", while a bit of Debussy uses "partially beamed". (All orch. reductions) So perhaps all three should be provided.
As for direction, Gardner Read basically shows only stems in the same direction, except for cross-staff beaming, as in worldwideweary's example.
A separate point, but in the sample attached below, in the first bar (squeezed up a bit), the beams crash into the left note. The bass in bar 3 shows a regular triple beam note, at the same spacing, where the stems are made to be different lengths to avoid the problem.