Deliberately Incomplete Measure
Many years ago (mid '90's) I put together a sequence of notes using a hardware MIDI sequencer that cared little about such niceties as measures or time signatures. You might say the entire sequence was one BIG measure. One of my pieces composed this way has a number of triplets in which the containing measure is deliberately incomplete - - a "skipping record" effect. The following 'regular' note occurs on the beat where one of the triplet notes would have sounded. I've been trying to notate this accurately without betraying the concept. The piece has quite a few measures like this.
Attached is a PDF. I hope the fonts are properly embedded. Example 1 illustrates the idea. Measure 9 is a truncated measure. Beneath the measure, I put a "proposed" time signature of thirteen over a sixteenth triplet. Has anyone seen a score with such a thing?
Example 2 shows the same sequence, adjusted so that the triplet sixteenth is equivalent to a regular sixteenth note. It works, but it is not really what I want.
So is that strange time signature on measure 9 "OK," or am I overlooking a more simple and logical solution.
Thanks.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| The two examples.pdf | 55.79 KB |
Comments
What's wrong with the second version? It's clear, to the point, and exactly how everyone else who writes this music does it, except you should break the beams into groups of threes as in the first version. Why invent a new notation and then have to explain it to everyone who ever reads your music, and go through handstands to notate it in the first place?
In reply to What's wrong with the second by Marc Sabatella
I nearly forgot, but in Gardner Read's Manual of Modern Practice, there are numerous examples of using a NOTE instead of a NUMBER as the denominator of a time signature -- granted, I didn't see any triplet-notes being used.
I don't know. I think 3/4 is easier to read than 9/8. And I think my funny time signature looks "cool."
In reply to Not really new by RAMALAM
3/4 might be easier to read for beginners, but hopefully you won't expect beginners to play this! You can of course do whatever you want when nitating music that no ine but you will ever see. But if you are expecting others to read your music, it is to your advantage to notate things the way musicians are accustomed to. And your #2 - perhaps with different beaming, as I mentioned, to show the groupings that are most logical for your particular music - is absolutely the way the rest of the world does this, the way other musicians are accustomed to seeing it, and hence the way you'll get the best results.
In reply to 3/4 might be easier to read by Marc Sabatella
As my final entry in this thread, Gardner Read discusses a related concept in the sub-section Fractional Meters in chapter 10 of his Manual; namely, employing a fractional numerator. I can put 2 and 2/3 in the numerator position over a 4. Although I still like idea of a tripleted symbol in the denominator, the fractional numerator at least has precedent in Pierre Boulez (Le marteau sans maître). I can try to create this in Inkscape and import the svg into MuseScore.