At 11:55 AM -0400 5/2/05, Raymond Horton wrote:
The only time we would not play a piece was a new symphony that had four part divisis in all the strings - with crossing glissandi, etc., all in one staff. Totally unreadable. We told the composer, his only response was to come back the next day with enlarged pages!
Four crossing parts in one staff? That's insane! We learn from our mistakes, and I hope he learned from his. Obviously that composer is not a string player, and perhaps should be under court injunction to refrain from writing for strings until he learns his craft. Garbage in, garbage out!
Standard, of course, is to split to as many staves as needed for as short a time as possible. I've seen it in "1812," John Williams, something by Grieg, and the Barber "Adagio" among others. I'm not sure how the 4-part first violin chords at the end of "Valse Triste" are notated (we violists already have our instruments in the cases before they finish!), but I'd bet it's on at least two staves.
With that said, I have sometimes violated the elementary rules, but for good reason. In my "Variations on a Hymn Tune" for concert band, I use the euphoniums in unison, then in two parts, three parts, and four parts. To make it perfectly clear and to give them (and the conductor) flexibility in deciding how to double parts, I broke those passages out into one, two, three and four staves as needed, all on a single part. Euphonium players NEVER see anything like that, but it was a special situation with a special solution and they certainly had no trouble figuring it out.
And for a good many years I directed and did about half the arranging for a very good college show ensemble, and both of us used similar vocal notation. Unless there was a special reason to write separate soprano, alto, tenor and bass staves, we wrote the choral parts on two staves, one for women and the other for men (using sometimes bass clef and sometimes tenor G-clef). We did it so that we could expand each staff from unison to two, three, or even four parts, and collapse it back down again to unison. The trick, of course, was that when the music was sent out before the season started, it went with a chart that specified which part each individual singer was to sing when their staff split into two, three or four parts, and it was perfectly easy for them to highlight their own personal part and learn it. That way we didn't face the dilemma of having to decide whether to put, for example, the added voice in a 3-part passage for women on the soprano staff or the alto staff. It's a notational convention that's pretty standard for commercial vocal group writing, from what I've seen, and that writing is almost always homophonic. If it gets contrapuntal, that's when you switch to separate staves.
John
-- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
