Notating slow gliss across several measures

[wing]

I have a passage where I want the violins to gliss very slowly across several measures, going a short interval distance of a major third, all the while maintaining a tremolo. I looked at both Behind Bars and Music in the 20th Century and can’t really find a satisfying example for this type of thing. The sound I’m after is indeed subtle but it works, just not sure how best to notate it.

I tried a couple things -

1. starting note with tremolo, and then remove notes and rest in between, showing a clear gliss and final note in brackets since it’s not meant to be articulated, finally landing on the articulated pitch of A.

or same but with a line where I added custom text to really clarify it:

2. Show interim pitches (Gould’s suggestion in Behind Bars, pp.144-145)

In this case in order to show the pitch is changing over smaller intervals in time I’m using microtones.

3. Show stems as rhythmic markers for the pulse, not actual pitch reference:

I’ve seen this around but I feel like it might imply there should be rhythmic articulation on those beats.

As a player myself, I lean toward the first options because it’s the easiest to read without ambiguity. I feel like the interim pitch approach (using microtones) would be more confusing at a glance IMHO. But then again, as a composer it can be easy to forget what makes perfect sense in our heads may not translate in the wild…

Whichever approach I go with, I also feel like all of them could use some engraving improvement, so I’m all ears for any suggestions to make this better and more readable. Do I even need the g# in parentheses, or can the line go straight to the final A?

Thank you!

[ryanpetriello]

I think the G# is unnecessary unless that’s the target pitch and then you want a defined half step from that note to the A, although in that case I would probably put the G# on beat 4 or the and of 4 of the previous bar.

Of the options presented I think I like 1 and 2 the best, but I would recommend keeping the tremolo going through all 5 bars instead of just the first and last bar. As it currently stands, if I was handed that in a part with no prior information I wouldn’t know to maintain the tremolo throughout.

[wing]

Thanks, I initially wondered the same about the tremolo, but couldn’t figure out how to have whole note tremolo without the whole notes showing (hide notehead doesn’t work for whole notes apparently). But then I thought to maybe use color: opacity and set all the selected notes to 0% which to my surprise worked without affecting the tremolo markings. As in:

I think it makes sense and is probably easier to read than all the previous options!

[Christian_R]

Hi @wing, you may want to consider activating the Erase Background property override, with customised paddings, for better readability:

[wing]

Thanks, I was playing around with that too but it was too much - didn’t notice the padding settings though, that’s super helpful!

[Christian_R]

Sorry, another tipp: in Engrave mode you can position the repeated tremolos a little higher at every bar, to simulate the pitch going up (see my previous updated screenshot).