How to get across a slow cadenza in an Allegro?
I am arranging Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for a chamber ensemble. And one thing is stopping me from getting the playback as I want it. That is the Adagio tempo marking of the cadenza. It is supposed to be that at the cadenza, all instruments except the one playing the cadenza(the flute in my ensemble) are at the Allegro tempo(Why else would Beethoven write a small Adagio marking) and then after the cadenza, everybody is going Allegro. That is what I'm wanting in my playback. Now, I would imagine that I have to figure out the ratio between 160 and 50(my respective Allegro and Adagio BPM for this piece) and compress the last quarter note in the phrase in all but 1 instrument by that much in order to get the playback I'm wanting(Allegro quarter note leading into Adagio cadenza).
That ratio between my Allegro and my Adagio is 16:5, not such a friendly ratio. Okay, so the ratio method is out of the question, now what? Is there any way I can get just the flute to play at Adagio instead of having the entire ensemble play at Adagio without having to go deep into the code at the bar where the cadenza occurs? I knew right away that I would need to make the bar with the cadenza a 9/4 bar which means a lot of invisible rests to get it to look like a cadenza in 2/4 and not a time signature change.
Here is what I have so far of the arrangement. The cadenza is at bar 268.
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Comments
Why don't you just use hidden fermatas with time-stretch, or hidden tempo markings at every note, until it sounds the way you want it to? It is your ear, not your calculator, that has to accept the result.
In reply to Why don't you just use… by [DELETED] 1831606
So wait a second, you're saying that I can put hidden tempo markings of quarter note = 50 at every note of the flute cadenza except the first half of the half note by adding a second voice, putting a tie in place of the half note, and then making the tied notes invisible and silent and making the tie itself invisible to get the effect that I am wanting of quarter notes at Allegro leading to the slow cadenza in the flute and then put a visible tempo marking like how I would put in any tempo marking, so that the flutist knows to get back to the Allegro tempo? So something like this will work?
In reply to So wait a second, you're… by Caters
You don't have to say "quarter = 50" many times in a row! A tempo indication holds valid until the NEXT tempo indication! You can remove all those "quarter=50"s except the first! I guess the invisible tied note is a credible technique, but if you are the "arranger", it is better not to make it invisible! You can say Tempo I as you do, that looks fine visually.
By the way, I think your score would look better if you duplicated Beethoven's beaming.
In reply to You don't have to say … by [DELETED] 1831606
You gave me the impression that each quarter was at a very special, different tempo; that is not the case! Yours is the usual case --- one tempo gives way to another for a while, then another, or the first, tempo returns.
In reply to You don't have to say … by [DELETED] 1831606
Well the invisible tied note was just to get the first quarter note in all the other instruments to be at Allegro while at the same time having the half note that Beethoven originally wrote be clearly visible to the flutist. Beethoven himself has his Adagio marking not above the half note of the cadenza for spatial reasons.
Yeah, I know I need to fix the beaming and add slurs, I'm just focusing on the notes for now, but I will fix the beaming to be identical to Beethoven's beaming and add slurs.
In reply to Well the invisible tied note… by Caters
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In reply to Well the invisible tied note… by Caters
See https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/time-signatures#change-default-beam… for how to fix all the beaming in one click.
In reply to See https://musescore.org/en… by [DELETED] 1831606
I read that page and I honestly am not sure it would make it less labor intensive to fix the beaming because then I will go from having the beams default in pairs and having to drag mid-beam all over the place to having the beams default in groups of 4 and having to drag no beam to a lot of notes. I guess I could have it change to have the first eighth note not being beamed and the other 3 being beamed(which is by far Beethoven's most common configuration of eighths in the first movement due to his motive that he unifies the entire symphony with being 3 eighths followed by a longer note), but once again, that means dragging mid-beam to a lot of notes(everywhere that I see a beam of 4 notes instead of 3, I would have to drag mid-beam to the second eighth note of the bar).
No matter what I do as far as changing the default beaming of 2/4, I am still going to have to do a lot of manual changes wherever the beaming isn't the same as the default that I set. So is it really less labor intensive to change the default beaming of 2/4 and then drag mid-beam wherever I see a beam of 4 eighths instead of 3 than it is to keep the default for 2/4 as it is and just do all the fixing manually if either way requires quite a bit of manual work?
In reply to Well the invisible tied note… by Caters
Unless you are looking at an urtext edition or a reproduction of Beethoven's original manuscript, you probably aren't actually copying what Beethoven wrote - only how his editor / publisher decided to represent Beethoven's intent. It's perfectly acceptable and indeed often better to reconsider those sorts of decisions with modern standards in mind, lest you inadvertently make the music harder to read for musicians today.
There is almost no way Beethoven actually intended the accompaniment to be a different tempo than the soloist, that was probably just a simple oversight on the part of the editor.