I have another picky notation question:
When combining accent marks with tenuto or staccato marks, how can I lock them together as a single accent mark. As you can see in my screenshots, accents sometimes get separated from the other marks. This doesn’t follow notation conventions, as I understand them.
Interesting … novice engraver observation: Everything except staccato, tenuto and staccato-tenuto are always outside of a slur, the others are always inside the slur so what you are noticing doesn’t surprise me.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an accent inside a slur.
Would love to hear other, more knowledgeable engravers chime in, though.
With an slur endpoint, articulations of duration go inside the slur, and articulations of force go outside. That’s the standard notation convention.
You can click this toggle to combine them outside:
Or change this engraving option if you disagree with it:
Thanks for the tip, Fred.
As far as the notation goes, I’ve always seen the tenuto+accent (and staccato+accent) as a single marking, not two separate ones. So it looks and “feels” really strange to me to see the parts of that single musical gesture (if I can call it that) separated into two separate instructions (which is what it looks like, to me, when the two get separated on a score). Maybe I’ve been coddled into feeling this way by Finale, which has single combined markings for such things. But now that you mention it, I will try remembering to pay attention to that in traditionally published scores to see how publishers have dealt with it.
PS: To be clear I should probably say that I would normally prefer to have the staccato and accent placed together outside of the slur, unless there were a large leap that made them work better inside an awkward slur.
Yeah, this was a pain in Finale as you had to use two separate articulations to achieve it instead of one. There are all sorts of exceptions to the general notation rule of course. If you have a series of identical markings, it’s best if they look identical. Often if there’s a large leap, it’s better to put the articulation of force under the slur endpoint so the slur doesn’t have to have such a steep angle, etc.
