The composer of this piece does a lot of joining up long notes with slurs, and often these passages are written within a phrase mark.
So mostly slurs were joining the last notehead in a tie chain with the first notehead in the following tie chain.
And conversely, phrase marks were mostly from the first note head in a tie chain to the last note head in the following tie chain.
So I spent more time than I’d like selecting noteheads and typing “S” and then adjusting the properties of the individual slur. Yes, I can set Engraving options to alter the default behaviour to one or other of the above, but if you’ve got an equal number of slurs and phrase marks you end up doing fiddly configuration in the bottom options zone on half of the slurs or phrase marks you write. And there can be hundreds.
But how nice it would be to have:
one key command that creates a legato or joining slur (per above definition) and
another key command that creates a phrase mark (per above definition)
… between selected (tied) notes.
… and equivalent (long press?) touch commands on the iPad.
(I’m not sure how this works on Ipad) Can you create a slur and a phrase and set the appropriate start/end properties. Then copy these when you need to, rather than entering new slurs/phrases?
I’m trying to picture this. Is there really any need to place the slurs differently? Gould suggests that phrase-slurs go outside articulation-slurs, which makes it clear which is which.
I’ve also been wondering about the absence of a phrase mark in Dorico.
My understanding, as taught in the 1970s for the UK ABMS theory exam, is that it marks a “musical sentence”.
And therefore it’s fundamentally different from the slur indications written for string players (Piston “Orchestration” says the slur indicates that the phrase should be played with the same bow direction), and for wind players (where I would read a slur as changing the keys without tounging ) .
The meaning of “articulation-slurs” and “phrase-slurs” is different, but they are both slurs and their appearance and construction is the same. See Ted Ross, p. 139-ff.
Dorico takes a semantic approach, certainly, but to sub-classify different types of slur might be a bridge too far, unless there’s evidence of a wide-spread tradition of displaying these types differently, and I’m not convinced there is – though I wait to be proved wrong!
Do other notation apps make a distinction? I know Finale doesn’t.
Using standard slurs as phrase marks really only makes sense in keyboard and other sustained pitched percussion writing as they have a different meaning in wind, string, and voice writing. Because of this Stone (pg 35-36) advocates using dotted or dashed slurs for phrasing. I suppose Dorico could have a separate keycommand to automatically create a dashed slur and give dashed slurs a separate set of Engraving Options in terms of tie chain positioning. I don’t recall really seeing this be requested before though.
@iainH, even though there aren’t keycommands for the properties Janus mentioned, you can create keycommands for basically anything in the Properties box with some manual editing of your keycommands.json file. There are quite a few walkthroughs on how to do this on the forum. I think Leo posted a good one a couple of years ago. Having a simple keycommand to set the start or end position in the tie chain I assume would speed things up for you.
Yes @FredGUnn that sounds what I’m after.
I wasn’t concerned that phrase marks should appear any differently, only that i should be able to, in effect, toggle the slur lines options in the dialogue with key commands according to whether it was one kind of slur or another.
With a caveat: I have been doing a large part of my note input on a large project on the iPad and AFAIK I would not have access to key commands’ JSON data?
One final note: I have little depth of knowledge on this topic and may not have accurately motivated the feature request. But in this project, I’m pretty sure now that the composer
joins sequences of long (tied) notes together “last notehead to first notehead” eg to keep the phrases legato without toungeing
marks phrases “first (tied) notehead to (usually/always?) first notehead in tie chain”
It is an old thread but the fact that there is no difference between Legato and Phrasing slurs is for me an issue. It would be much simpler if the T would generate a Tie and a Legato slur and the S a phrasing slur which would not evoke a legato articulation. So the script would be build in to make a slur curve active or not.
I have put a full Beethoven Symphony and the Williams Harry Potter Suite in a Dorico score trying to match the original score 100% and avoiding that slurs meant by the composer to show phrases to provoke legato is a huge additional work. Apart from the fact that it also requires a decision what the composer meant of course as that is not always clear.
I think composers who seemingly use slurs mainly for phrasing also inevitably suggest some sort of legato playing. When I see a long slur, I may change bowing when needed, but assume to try and play legato as much as possible. How would a musician know to not play legato there? If the composer intends a détaché, they shouldn’t write a slur at all.
My main point here is to get an easy way to enter the phrase vs a legato slur- Maybe my idea of using the T and S can work for this. Slur interpretation as to what the composer meant with it is a fascinating topic.
@PjotrB makes a very good point. If I see a long phrase slur in a score I usually assume it is a phrase only and not Legato but it can be both. In Dorico you can add the textual indication Legato but I seldom saw it in the scores I studied.
I am not a string player so I do not exactly know how many notes can be played in one bow but you of course also have legato for the non-string instruments where a limitation might e.g. be breath length. I am a guitarist there the slurs mean hammering or pull off with your fingerboard hand which also has a lot of limits. It also depends on the dynamics (pp more than ff) for many instruments I guess.
Williams has short slurs over 3 ⅛ notes which are most probably meant as legato but also slurs going over 12 or more 1/32 notes. I left most of them unchanged for now. So Dorico will play them legato although it might not be possible in practice and meant as phrasing only.
The orchestral scores of Beethoven I studied seldom show such long slurs. On the other hand you also see double slurs in some printed Beethoven scores. E.g. short legato slurs with a longer one above which shows the phrase. The are absent in other scores of the same piece. What you also see is dotted notes with slurs above e.g. in the famous allegretto of the 7th symphony. Dorico ignore the dots and plays legato which is not correct. What it is meant to be according to the experience Prof. Clive Brown is portato notes which are clearly separated but not shorter than notated.
In general, a group of 12 1/32 notes will be easily playable on 1 bow, even in a slow tempo. My guess is that Williams will carefully notate bowing for strings and tonguing/breathing for winds. It’s the most common — and correct — way of using slurs. And especially in film music, there’s no time for interpretation of endless slurs, things have to be clear right away. As a string player, it also annoys me when a composer basically tells you they’re too lazy to think about how you’re supposed to play their music. It’s part of their job.
So what does an Urtext version of the score show? What did Beethoven write as opposed to later editors? NP notwithstanding, changes in bow direction do not necessarily mean abandoning legato.
Have a look in Youtube under Beethoven , Clive Brown. Apparently only 20-100 years after Beethoven wrote his music the music world became obsessed with playing exactly what was written by the composer. Brown shows with quotes from Beethoven and his contempories that in Beethoven‘s time there was a lot of room left for interpretation.
The difference between a good player who played correct (what was written) and a virtuoso who played a piece beautiful was exactly the way the virtuoso made use of these liberties. That went very wide from varying the tempo, to additional embellishments and cadences instead of a fermata… This included also the way written articulations were interpreted.
On top of this instruments (like the piano of today vs the piano forte) and the playing techniques developed…
@Derrek I somewhere have a pdf of the Urtext of the 7th symphony but you have to be a real expert to be able to decipher it compently. A lot of corrections and steno like articulation signs and of course the often discussed dots and dashes.
@PjortB I only have the official scores of the Scorcerer‘s Stone and Star Wars suites. There is no explanation there on the way the notation should be interpreted.
As a (woodwind) player I often find myself annotating a score with “slur” markings to denote a phrase / motif especially those that counter the meter across bar lines.
As a writer of pieces mainly for a jazz quartet, I like to communicate some sets of notes as being a phrase - several notes; one idea - and within that phrase there may be a variety of articulations.
In this case the phrase markings denote the phrase and quite separately, other markings denote the playing technique.
It is interesting to see that there was never any effort by the influencing music notation gurus to make the different interpretation possibilities of these big horizontal brackets once and for all clear.
To add one more variant with room for interpretation; in many JW scores you regularly see two tied notes with an accent (or tenuto mark) on the second note. Is this simply a notation format issue like the choice on which note a slur ends when the end notes are two or more tied notes or is the player supposed to play a a very short crescendo at the end of the tie when it has an accent?
Dorico at default setting automatically shifts the accent or tenuto mark to the first note if you tie it to a a previous one. Only when you use a slur instead of a tie the format will be as in the original score but the second note will be played separately and not as a long tied note.
I’m trying to picture this. Is there really any need to place the slurs differently? Gould suggests that phrase-slurs go outside articulation-slurs, which makes it clear which is which.