3 note tremolos?

• Feb 19, 2017 - 23:27

I ran across an unusual tremolo written by Bartok that looks like this:

Bartok Tremolos.png

Of course I had to see if MS could do this. I put the 2 note tremolo on the middle note, then on the first note and ended up with this:

Bartok Tremolos in MS.png

Needles to say, This is not what I expected. It will take some work to make it look like that using staff text and special characters; and then even more work to make it sound right - but I'm up to the challenge.

The only thing I don't understand is why the engraver put the dots after the notes when this is in 3/4 time. I thought that they might be tuplets, but no tuplet markings exist on the score for the tremolos.


Comments

In reply to by underquark

That looks very good, but inconsistent with the rest of the tremolos in MS, so it would probably confuse someone looking at the entire score. As far as the sound, I'm thinking triplet running 32nd notes low Eb, Bb, high Eb, low Eb etc. This is one harp on each line, so there is nothing to lead me to believe the Bb should be played in both directions.

In reply to by underquark

The third beat looks much better. I'm not concerned about Bartok being consistent, I'm worried about notation being consistent. The first stab at tremolos just looked like 32nd notes. Here is what I came up with, and it plays the way I described.

Bartok Tremolos in MS.png

I squished together 32nd note triplets and unhid the beams like you did in this try.

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