Dorico needs to get their act together on string instrument fingerings and bow markings. I spent too much money on this software to have basic symbols missing. It is frustrating!
I should be able to add a bow lift (retake) without having to go to holds and pauses (it’s a comma, give us the comma, the comma can live in more than one place)
I should be able to add a H/L/X next to a fingering. I shouldn’t have to create a work around. Let us put the fingering that we want in.
(I don’t think any of these are ‘basic’ for strings)
Setting aside that I have never seen this bowing notation in the wild (and wouldn’t know what it meant if I did come across one), you can easily create a playing technique for it.
Again, what do these mean?
At least in the U.S., using a comma to indicate a bow retake is very common in educational music. I suspect H/L/X are indications of high, low, and extended fingers. Again, they are pretty common in educational music for strings.
Having consulted a few string teachers here in the UK, they were baffled by these marks. (their approach was “kids won’t see these in real music, so we won’t teach it”) - but my sample may be very small.
Like a breath mark? I just started learning violin 6 months ago and just took that to be a pause and didn’t do a retake.
I’ve never seen of H/L/X and even with their identification, I don’t know what they are. Do they indicate half/whole steps?
That’s really interesting. I see the retake marking pretty commonly, but my sample is limited to what I see from US educational publishers. Here’s an example that I was teaching earlier today:
I think that the high, low, extended markings are most common in older method books that I’ve seen and I can only remember seeing them in lower case. For instance, a G# on the D string might be marked h3 to remind a student that the finger is 1/2 higher than the “normal” 3rd finger.
Very intersting. I’ve never heard of retakes on a breath mark. The one in m.4 doesn’t seem to serve any purpose as a pause so that would’ve confused me. After m.21 if I put a breath marks where these are as a composer, I’d intend the players to pause. Would they not pause there, only do a retake?
The down bow in m. 21 is going to take the player a long way to the tip, so a retake is going to be needed to play m. 22. Indeed, I spent part of this morning teaching my students that they had to stop the note in m. 21 a bit short so that they could make the retake and get to the downbeat of m. 22 in tempo.
I don’t think that, in this context, a pause makes musical sense. At least, I’ve never heard a performance of the original or this arrangement where the players pause after m. 21, m. 23, or m. 25.
As I said, this may be limited to US educational publications. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the comma used to indicate a retake outside of that sort of publication.
Ouch. That’s disturbing. Thank goodness I have never seen that edition.
Apart from the fact I hate the clutter of the bar numbers together with those idiotic rehearsal marks, the commas add nothing but uncertainty. A comma is a caesura (an interruption to the time flow). Its use here is an abomination.
NO! It’s presto. The m21 note need only take half the bow. The following bar allows the player to work their way back to the heel for the next longer note. No retake required!
Sorry, but this is basic orchestral technique.
