Is this possible? It doesn’t seem to be. Working on a piece that occasionally has two layers of hairpins … for instance a large crescendo over several measures, with short crecs and decrecs within each measure.
It’ll work if one set is voice-specific.
Not necessarily, AFAIK… but you can only enter them in caret mode.
Try this:
- Enter note input mode (this shows the caret)
- Position the caret at the start of e.g. cresc.
- Hit < or > (with shift depressed) to start cresc. or dim.
- Hit SPACEBAR as many times as you’d like
- Hit ? to finish that hairpin
Repeat steps 3–5 above for second hairpin, and you’re done.
Something like this…
Is this something players would understand though? I’d have not a clue what to do with that. You can consider it part of me always learning, but why not cresendo to f, descrendo to mf, cresendo to ff or whatever, making it explicit? Seems like at a minimum it would cost rehearsal time to explain.
Depends on the engraving, I guess… if you have e.g. a long "dim. . . . " and inside that, small <>, then that would seem pretty clear: little swells while overall decreasing in intensity.
In fairness to @thiagotiberio I suspect he was just demonstrating it’s possible, not that you’d employ it in that manner.
1 Like
Using two opposing directives, as above, might be a real thing in a “1st time crest, 2nd time dim.” situation.
1 Like
That’s a perfect example, @tristis, because the longer hairpin on the second bar clarifies the extent of the dim. from the previous bar. What a find! Bravo 
1 Like
This is a great example and it makes perfect musical sense too.
1 Like
Slightly OT, but I’m glad Brahms took the trouble to notate that passage that way, although ideally it shouldn’t have been necessary. There are too many musicians who see a gradual dynamic and forget that there still needs to be dynamic modulation within the cresc. or dim.
To me the secondary hairpins would apply only to bring out the lowest voice in the treble clef while the larger dynamics apply to the passage as a whole.
1 Like
Absolutely. My point about the necessity is that one could be expected to do that naturally even without the secondary hairpins and despite the primary one.
The Brahms example occurs a lot in the New Complexity music I engrave, where this school is very fussy about fine shades of dynamics all the time. I have been wondering how to achieve this!