In my current score I’ve got a harp part, which means a lot of tremolos to deal with. Also three wind instruments with lots of trills.
Say for simplicity that I have a tremolo whole note in a 4/4 bar that continues for two more beats in the next measure. I mark the tremolo with the R popover and ///.
What is current thinking about ties in such a case? I have ties in my score, but am editing extensively as I enter stuff in Dorico.
(Now that I think about it, how do I type two whole notes in a 4/4 bar so that I can add tremolos between them?)
Tremolos are basically trills on non-adjacent notes. I think the difference is that trills are marked with a tr and followed by a ~~~ trill line on notes that are tied.
I’ve been out of touch. (About 40 years.) Is this how the Dorico community of composers and engravers agrees this is how it should be handled?
FWIW, I’m familiar with Elaine Gould (got her book on Kindle and have read it cover to cover), and I think I need to correct my thinking.
I think a slur over the whole thing, which is what Gould suggests as well.
You enter half notes on the desired pitches, select them both, and do Shift+R ///2 Enter. The 2 tells Dorico that this is a 2-note tremolo, and Dorico will display them as whole notes accordingly. Same thing in the next measure: for a 2-beat tremolo, which displays as half notes, enter quarter notes and apply the tremolo.
It depends, Aaron; putting a slur on a separate group of tremolos suggests a reprise of the attack on the depth of the piano key, or breath on winds, etc. And Mrs Gould doesn’t know that…
I’m not sure I follow. The image above, which is from Gould, indicates one attack at the beginning and another on the 4th beat of the second bar. Is there something contradictory there?
The OP was basically asking about how to notate the first two tremolos, the ones on E and G. If you don’t want a separate attack over the barline, then the slur is the way to indicate it.
What I meant was that, on a tremolo of the same notes (e.g. the Mi-Sol third shown above), it is possible to indicate a reprise of the attacks with slurs, which could, for example, be isolated for each of the thirds in the example above.
Extending the slur to the entire tremolo does not give the same result at all.
Sure, that’s consistent with Gould. I think you could also just omit the slurs if you wanted to rearticulate in the second bar. The single slur makes it clear that there’s only one attack, which is how I interpreted the OP “tremolo whole note…that continues for two more beats in the next measure”.
Slurs make sense. The example from Gould was helpful. Some follow-up notes:
I did mean ties, not slurs.
I conclude that I should delete ties on tremolos and replace with slurs. There are no cases of rearticulation.
In the case of the first harp tremolo, the first pair is actually last 3/5 of a 5:4 tuplet at the end of the bar “tied” to a whole note, tied to a half note in a 6/4 bar. Why not just a dotted whole there? Because there is also a crescendo and a forte-piano (fp) on the fifth beat.
Yes, I mentioned harp, but there are also flute, clarinet, and tuba. They will all do tremolos in due time
The example I gave was fabricated for simplicity’s sake.
The instructions on how to produce tremolos using half values, Shift+R, and ///2 is something I wouldn’t have figured out without asking. Thanks very much for that.
*Therefore I concur with Aaron’s analysis here.
I’m into a section where there are a bunch of these overlapping in all instruments over a few bars, and I’ve never done it before. (Three weeks experience with Dorico.) So the fun is about to becin.
Thanks again to everyone. I consider this solved and will mark it as such but will be back if I run into more problems.
Multi-note tremolos are never tied (In my experience). They are notated as a sequence of different base durations (some of which may be dotted) that add up to the total duration required.
