Cut time works, but I can’t express two cut Cs. Is there a possible way to do it?
If that’s the only style of Cut C in your project, you could edit the symbol in the Music Symbols Editor with an additional glyph.
Otherwise, you’ll have to fake it with a very small bar between the two. (And then fix the bar numbering). I did something similar with early music metres here:
Does it mean anything different from the “normal” cut C as 4/2…?
Nope, just 4/2. (It’s Schubert D 899.)
“Alla breve” means only that the pulse of the music is a half note. It’s not necessarily 2/2.
Maybe Schubert didn’t know that
Even Bach wrote one cut C at the beginning of the Credo in his B minor mass although it’s a 4/2 meter.
It’s funny, I did this very recently, by creating a Playing Technique. Since I’m learning Dorico, I give myself small challenges when I come across a special score For this Schubert piece, it might not be the best way to do it, but it works (you just need to hide the time signature and move the notes to the right in Engrave mode). If you need the normal Cut C elsewhere in the project, that could be a good solution.
I think he uses cut C for 4/2 in a few places in the mass, and then uses a “Cut 2” (2 with a line through it) where he wants 2/2.!
It might have been Schubert’s clever way to avoid what may have been a somewhat esoteric meter at that time in a piano piece.
Beethoven on the other hand seems to have had a “thing” about 6/4 and often wrote it as 3/2. But the following is a real head scratcher for a 6/4 section:
He may have been giving the editor a choice or doing a very mysterious calculation involving the two. The first edition chose common time: C! Not even cut time.
Great example. OT: John, do you suppose Beethoven was trying to imply that that variation is in hemiola throughout?
Thanks, @Mark_Johnson One might think, but there’s not a hint of hemiola in the variation. Almost every measure has two dotted half notes, as in the example.
He definitely seems to dislike 6/4 meter. In the last movement of the ninth symphony there are two consecutive sections, one in a real 3/2, marked as such, followed by another section in 6/4, also marked 3/2!
Here’s a theory: Perhaps for him 6/4 always meant quarter note beats, not dotted half note beats, and he felt that music lacked a meter corresponding to 2/2, but for when each beat is divided in to three quarter notes instead of 2. (Pretty strange from the guy synonymous with the fast 3/4 scherzo.)
So maybe the 3/2 ¢ means: like regular 2/2, but using the 6 quarter notes of 3/2.
But perhaps he would have done better to write 3/4 3/4, like Schubert!