On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 14:39, Joshua Parmenter wrote:
This is described in Matt Stone's book "Music Notation in the 20th
Century" (not just 20th century music notation, but the practices of
notation in the 20th century):
"The tremolo bars should be thinner than beams, and as long or a
little longer than the width of a note-head
On beamed notes, the tremolo bars usually slant sightly more than the
beams
Note that the tremolo bars always slant upward, regardless of beam-
slant"
Mostly, you want to avoid them looking like beams that didn't print
correctly... so, avoiding tremolos parallel to the beams is of
importance. When the beams are at the same angle that the tremolos
would be, then the tremolos are adjusted slightly to avoid this.
I can scan the page tonight if that would help.
I think it would be most helpful if you could find a printed
example of music
that shows this -- regardless of what Matt Stone says, I don't
think I have
ever seen a tremolo slanted in the opposite direction of a beam. He
must cite
some references -- maybe you can find an example there.
One of my previous examples was the Bartok solo violin sonata
(which couldn't
have been typeset before 1947) and it has downward slanting
tremolos on
downward slanting beams (parallel to the beam). I just picked up a
Kalmus
edition of Ravel Introduction and Allegro (Violin 2), typeset at the
beginning of the 20th century, and it also has tremolos parallel to
beams
even when beams slant downward.
Slightly unrelated, but now that you have me peering closely at
tremolo
flags... all the examples I have on hand have rectangular tremolo
flags on
beamed notes and parallelogram tremolo flags (what we do now) on
unbeamed
notes. Also the flags on beamed notes are much shorter than on
unbeamed notes
(about 60-70% the width).
Joe