The original example is terrible, and I’m pretty sure that everyone who’s into the matter at hand not only recognizes so, but might’ve explicitly said so. In the notat.io thread Leo linked to, the second post immediately rebates it. That much we can agree on! That doesn’t mean the rest of the discussion is pointless. snakeeyes didn’t directly comment, but did provide clearer examples. I think most of us just ignored the original example because it was, in fact, quite unfortunate.
FWIW ALL I was attempting to do was let Rob Tuley know what was meant by “split/incomplete tuplet”. I was amused to see that our very own John Ruggero was the third poster on that thread…
Romanos, you’ll find occasional random edits on the part of the forum software. There’s a user here whose name gets changed every time. Apparently the forum thinks it’s a crude reference… 
Yeah, a quick and dirty google search brings up surprisingly few results. A number are just links to this forum (and now some to this thread!). I’m surprised you found anything at all, Leo.
In any case, I’ll add to the chorus and say that whether or not something seems clear or reasonable to one sector of the musical community is hardly the metric by which something should be deemed reasonable by us as composers/engravers/arrangers/etc. As a composer, admittedly, I’d rarely need such a notation (though, it has come up). As an engraver, however, I need all sorts of things that I would never consider writing, let alone wanting or trying to perform (and as a choral singer, that’s quite a bit). I could poo-poo the new complexity movement all day long (and I have, for one reason or another 
), but it doesn’t change the fact that there is a dedicated community of composers using those sorts of notations, a dedicated community of performers masochistic enough to insist on performing them, and enough of an audience to keep the whole cycle going.
IMHO, the notation software community could take a page from dictionary writers (…oh if bad puns could make for a good living) and be less prescriptive and more descriptive in our approach to musical material. Now obviously, there’s the caveat that the people programming the software can’t necessarily take such an “anything goes” approach (they have to go home and eat at some point), but there’s no reason anyone should need to argue with pretty firmly established new conventions simply because they don’t like them or think they’re complicated or hard.
I mean… there’s a lot of intellectual self gratification in music. My job as an engraver isn’t to decide what is and isn’t that. It’s only to decide whether said gratification should be typeset with the default or large notehead set 
That’s true enough. It seems all of the “I need to be able to do this quirk, so please add it as a feature” requests have come from engravers who are simply trying to reproduce what they’ve been given, poor chaps. We composers and arrangers, as a general rule, seem to have an easier time with native functionality.
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The way out of this dilemma is simple: don’t publish music till the composer is dead 
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The Adès is not a case of practicing what I’m not used to. I’m quite used to this stuff. But there is no way to sightread eight staves with 11:8 against 7:6 against 15:4 against… etc… Not for anyone. My point was simply that music does not have to be obviously parsable at sight for it to be worthwhile. There is a point to Adès’ complexity and some of that complexity is ‘aspirational’ rather than 100% accurately playable by a human. ‘The simplest way of writing is not always the best. Adès’ nested tuplets show me what he is thinking.
The general tenor of the topic was quite negative, so I thought your attitude was the opposite. We are in agreement!
Of course there is a point to complexity - sometimes. And the Adès’ of this world have achieved sufficient status that they can notate their complexity any way they see fit.
That doesn’t mean that a host of wannabees who want to copy Adès’ notation have any “thinking” that is worth “showing,” of course. Sometimes I’m reminded of a critic’s comment on a UK “Artists’ Colony” in the 1980s, whose former leading members were no longer alive - “everyone there knows how to look like an artist, but nobody knows how to paint”.
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I have to admit I’m completely mystified by this attitude of rejection. Let me preclude this by saying, Rob, that your posts almost unfailingly betray deep knowledge of the music being discussed, as well as great passion and wit. However, in this specific case… do you think you’re giving us any news in the post above? Don’t you think that the people involved, either writing or engraving this, have had the time to think about this? This is what I mean by blindspot. Certainly you can realize that most of what you say is quite self-explanatory – as well as a natural process that happens when any convention is negotiated through the organic practice of the community. Certainly you can understand that the discussion exists, it’s just that perhaps you’re not privy to it? Because you never really had to? And that that’s totally fine? This was quickly turned from a prosaic technical discussion regarding the application of a specific notational principle to a manichean issue, where the people who seem to have little to offer but a general rejection accuse the other side of not enough nuance (such as not knowing when a certain type of complexity is warranted or not).
Besides, your last argument can be generalized to whatever. Geist does not reside on the materials – not today, not ever. You can wade around in functional harmony, as you would in a kiddie pool, without having any thinking. Should we preclude people from writing at all? Should Dorico remove clef changes from someone who tries to write a Tuba in G clef?
Yes… I think that was what was happening. I was thinking of a blue bird with fancy tail feathers that everyone loves to see strut at the zoo. Part of that name (by itself) sounds bad even though it isn’t.
Oh yes, I didn’t mean to imply that the discussion at large was pointless; I was just expressing my concern that if the notation looks like that example, we’d need to seriously consider if this is proper notation if it’s not decipherable.
Fair enough; that said, if it truly doesn’t make sense in a communicable way, then one can argue that the manuscript is “incorrect”. There is often more than one way to notate an idea as you yourself skillfully demonstrated earlier in this very thread. The fact of the matter is, some things can be implemented incorrectly. Then as an engraver / editor your job is to sort it out. When I engrave old organ manuscripts I make edits all the time as the old hand-copyists made TONS of mistakes even though they did it for a living.
Now, I’m all for including additional options supposing they are used with discretion. However, it’s just like in the organ world where everyone wants more and more and more stops on ever-larger organs. When it comes to playing something “tutti” that doesn’t mean you have to use every single stop! You might get a clearer, more beautiful sound by filtering some stops out. I apply the same theory to notation: include what makes sense and is clear. Now I don’t have the right to tell another artist (composer/engraver) what they can and can’t do… I know that, but I can discourage a decision as a colleague if there is good reason.
Not to revive a dead horse (and I could’ve sworn I saw this mentioned, though I haven’t been able to find anything specific), but I just wanted wanted to register my excitement that split/incomplete tuplets are now super easy with the new expansion of the custom line tool. A little bit of hook adjusting, font changing, respacing, and hidden tempo changes and you’ve got yourself some fancy schmancy essentially functional split/incomplete tuplets (pairs well with irrational meters, but merlot is fine too).
Also, I suppose I post so that should someone go googling for it, this being the first thread that comes up, it’ll be found and made use of. Cheers!
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Nice!
I stumbled across this post and I have to say that I agree 100% with you, and that I was also expecting at some time to do something like this in Dorico. Somehow, I had the impression that people always uses irrational (although they’re very rational, as rational as a rational can be) time signatures like in method 1, but for me, that’s from a mathematic point of view, plainly wrong! It’s just a bad way of writing a metric modulation. And even so, not always a metric modulation is suitable or desiderable. For instance, what if only one of the staves needs to modulate? Writing a metric modulation is sometimes more cumbersome than just writing an incomplete tuplet.
Besides, albeit it’s true that these are difficult to read, that’s also a matter of training and what we’re used to, and depending on the contexts, sometimes incomplete tuplets (or any other new figure) is the clearest way to notate them.
Coincidental to the revival of this thread, I have a job that requires 4 quintuplet semis followed by different amounts of (displaced) crotchets, followed by a single quintuplet. The easiest way to read this is with incomplete tuplets.
I would love to have this feature! “Method 2” above is in many cases the most clear and readable notation by far.
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Until then, what is the best way to enter this?
Edit: I could also see notating it as a feathered accellerando figure.
How about if it was a nested tuplet? 4:6 inside of a bigger 3q/2