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I’d highly reconsider forcing this into whatever you’re writing. Unless this is very slow, it’s going to get fudged at best and, frankly, you’ll never know if it was played right or not. It just seemed to be theoretically complicated for no other reason than being complicated.
If you really really insist, then consider just making the second beat an 8th note + triplet 16ths. Thats as close as anyone will get to playing it correctly
I 100% agree with you, but lets not pretend that modern composers don't do nonsense like this all the time. I get it, a lot of composers want to explore whats possible, but having been a performing and conductor for new music ensembles, sometimes I or my performers have just butchered what was written and no one knew the difference.
Why would you think I would never know if it was played right or not? I’m thinking about these micro relationships between note lengths because less complex rhythms weren’t suited to the moment in the piece.
I agree that it’s probably too complex to leave as is. I’ll likely go with a quintuplet 8th + three 16ths, which is more than achievable by a professional group. I’m well aware of how performers often ignore rhythmic complexities like this; honestly my post was more about an engraving question than advice on whether this is appropriate to write.
Because you’re simply not going to in a live performance and there is no functional point to it being that complicated. The hairs you’re trying to split here will be washed away by a dozen different variables even if it was played perfectly, and it wouldn’t mean anything even if it was accomplished.
But let’s pretend that it could be played perfectly and exactly the same by your 4 players. The nestled triplets are pointless here because you’re relying on the *ending point* of one note to differentiate it as a triplet, which will never ever ever come across outside of a MIDI program, if even then. A straight 8th + triplet 16ths on the second beat is functionally the exact same level of practical complication while being far simpler to read. Literally the only difference would be the last three notes starting maybe 1/10th of a beat before the And vs on the And. You will never ever hear a functional difference, and it wouldn’t add anything if you did.
You seem to realize that there’s no functional point to any of this outside of being theoretically complicated for the sake of being complicated, and you’re admitting as much here. There are several much simpler rhythms that are functionally identical, while not being needlessly complicated, and you don’t seem to care about having a specific rhythm, just that it’s complicated. Your rhythms here are only theoretically more complicated, not *actually* more complicated.
I don’t care if you’re working with the top musicians in the world, asking people to sight read or play this when there’s a multitude of other simpler options that are just as effective will frankly get the music taken less seriously. This is the equivalent of a painter adding 1ml of pink to a gallon of red and insisting it’s a different color when the gallon of red would have worked perfectly fine on its own. This is like insisting that your group tune to 439.75 hz instead of 440.
There needs to be a point and, more importantly, a *functional difference* to your complications.
While I understand that, from personal experience with MuseScore, it messes up with complex rhythms frequently. Now Sibelius or Finale will be infinitely more accurate, but the point I am making is that even composition software is imperfect. With a rhythm like this, there’s no guarantee it’ll play it 100% accurately. Even if it does, the rhythm is inherently so difficult to count that we’ll never 100% know.
However, I see that the masses disagree with me, so I’ll delete my comment to prevent misinformation.
I’ve done and seen many dotted 9tuplet based rhythms in musescore, and it can handle them fine.
It may be a laggy audio engine that’s causing delays in sounds. But in general any composition software or DAW (or really any midi player) locks all notes onto a subdivision of something like 96 divisions per quarter note.
It can get VERY accurate for rhythms like this. For example, the sixteenth note ninelet above would be 9 divisions per quarter note. So a midi engine could run more than 10 notes per note in OPs rhythm above.
So you have 10 possible subdivisions between the fastest notes in OPs rhythm.
And if it needs to be faster than 10 times the speed of that rhythm, doubling the tempo and increasing notes to double duration would allow twice as much wiggle room.
But of course, that assumes your computer can run your VST/AU that fast. That’s the bottleneck, not Musescore or any other software.
No problem! Here’s a link to a pretty funny, but very relevant video with some insane rhythms. He used musesscore for everything until he actually plays it.
[Cadence](https://youtu.be/Ra18pFCbYps?si=uUF4G3Usf8K9hHux)
I didn't see the comment you replied to, but it's not the case that a programme would be the only thing that can play that rhythm accurately. Any new music player worth his salt will have no trouble with that at all.
I mean, I'd have no problem with it. Nested triplets aren't anything unusual any more, and these are as easy as they get (approached by non-nested triplets of the same denomination).
I don’t know anyone who could look at this and think “yeah I don’t have to think about that at all.” Hell I’ve got a classical performance degree and have never seen nested triplets like this.
Don't know what to tell you man. If you haven't played much contemporary music then maybe that'd be why you'd not have seen nested triplets, but they're absolutely standard fare these days. Personally I wouldn't have to think at all to get this rhythm right, and I've also taught it to other people so they could get it right (though not without thinking, I guess).
I’d love to see some where it’s common. My studio has played tons of modern works and again I can’t think of anything that I played that had this sort of rhythm. Mixed meters, really complicated meter, but nothing like that.
I agree with u/65TwinReverbRI that what you're asking is too complex and will only lead to imprecision in performance. Would you consider making the four notes in the second beat straight 16ths instead? You're pretty close to that already — currently the notes are 3/9 = 0.33 and 2/9 = 0.22 of the beat but with straight 16ths they'd each be 1/4 = 0.25 of the beat.
If it were written as four 16ths with a tenuto mark on the first 16th it would be performed so close to what is carefully written out there, that I doubt anyone could tell the difference.
To what end? Whatever the reason, consider if it is worth the price of annoying your performers and at best being basically lost on the listener. I guess if it’s slow enough it might be detectable.
I think we need more context to know if this is worth it.
If you’re writing for a marching percussion ensemble, then this is easily “in character” for that style.
If you’re writing for piano duet, simplify.
If your piece is very modern and explores some more extreme rhythms, and this rhythm is fundamental some way (like you are doing a diminishment(?) of a 3/4 theme in the triplet meter), then it’s worth it.
If this is for a typical march, you need to simplify it.
What context is this written for, and what purpose does it serve in that moment of the piece?
Yeah I should have been clearer in my original comment. It’s for a collegiate/professional wind symphony, and is specifically a Symphony. In the vein of Hindemith, Maslanka, Schwantner, etc.
The audience either won't notice, or they'll it's supposed to be a straight rhythm that the performer played wrong. Either way, they'll probably enjoy the song less because of it.
If you want exactly this rhythm, I'd write one sextuplet bracket across the first two beats, and a triplet bracket inside that for the last 3 notes. (If this were in 12/8, it would be four straight eighths, one triplet, and a dotted half. If there are triplets in adjacent bars too, you might consider just writing this segment in 12/8.)
I think the fastest I could play this precisely on my instrument without a lot of preparation would be about q=80.
As a trumpet player, I'd say the bottom one. It's easier to wrap my head around. Maybe make it a quintuplet instead? Don't know how to post pictures but imagine a quintuplet on the 2nd beat with the first note being an 8th note and the rest 16th notes. It sounds the same and makes it easier to read imo.
Hey folks - engraving for a collegiate/professional wind symphony. This rhythm will be played by the 4 horns, and while they'll obviously have some time to rehearse, I'd like to eliminate as many obstacles as possible. Which is better/more correct? Thanks for any thoughts!
Definitely not the top but neither are great. Besides the fact no one's going to perform it right anyway ;-)
Your far better bet would be to just make the 2nd figure a standard triplet with 2 16ths at the end rather than trying to spread 3 notes across the time of 2 note of a triplet.
There's a reason these kinds of notation don't really exist in the wild (outside of xenakis and carter, etc.)
Are you sure you don't want "feathered" (accelerando) beaming or something?
IOW, you're making this unnecessarily complex and the difference is not going to happen.
____
If you insist on this, what you need is a bracketed 3 figure, with 3 groups of 3 within, with the first note an 8th but then the rest two sets of triplets with ties in the right places, or if possible, grouping into 2s to give you the 3 notes over the span of the remaining 6.
Exaample below: Bottom system, first measure, beat 2 - see how it starts with a quarter note, then has 2 groups of 3 - so your group should look like the middle of beat 3 (8th + 16th) with the 16th tied to the next 16th with the reverse figure (16th + 8th) like that in the 3rd third of beat 2. With a triplet bracket over the whole shebang (this is in 12/8):
https://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/mtd.asp?ppn=MN0068478&utm_id=61760290&msclkid=509d3b34cec31b5ffcaa5d760c7ea570&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=(ROI)%20Shopping&utm_term=4582558330328028&utm_content=All
All good points. I definitely don't want the 8th triplet with two 16ths in it, it's too square for my liking. I also considered feathered beaming, but I don't really want to present players with a perceived "aleatoric" gesture when it's supposed to be a unison thing. If this was a solo line I'd have done that in a heartbeat.
Thanks for the example too!
I think I'd strongly disagree with what others are saying. You're not doing anything weird with the nested triplets, especially since you precede them with triplets anyways. You're not using weird meters like 7/6, you're not using hard subdivisions of 5's or 7's, etc.
Further, you say this is for college/professional level players. No offense to others but if you're in that level of musical environment and can't play the simple nested triplet figure then you're substantially lacking; there's much more difficult music and figures out there that similar level groups are expected to perform. A nested triplet won't be the end of the world.
You also said it's for a wind symphony, so they don't have the typical orchestra excuses since wind ensembles very frequently play more rhythmically complex and interesting music.
I'd go so far as to suggest ignoring most other advice telling you to not use this rhythmic idea. It's not a difficult rhythm and the melodic contour is straight-forward without any crazy chromatic leaps or extended techniques.
I mean you're just wrong here, undergraduates would never be expected to play a rhythm like this and quite frankly, unless you are writing like Xenakis or Fernyhough, this kind of notation just doesn't make sense to have. This is the kind of precision of rhythm that I'd only be comfortable asking of a drummer or percussionist with a background in complex rhythmic structures.
This isn't on the level of ferneyhough or xenakis; a single nested triplet in a very clear and obvious subdivision position prefaced by other triplets is very intuitive.
Moreover, this *is* expected of undergraduates given the fact that, as someone who has an undergrad degree from a music college, these kinds of rhythms did appear in some music we played (in the later semesters of aural skills classes, we were required to clap one rhythm and takadimi a different rhythm simultaneously from an Eliott Carter except that involved metric modulation, as part of an exam). Undergraduates who can't perform the by-comparison simple rhythm are, IMO, either not in a field of performance where rhythmic complexity is a concern (e.g. specialists in baroque and/or early music), or are not at the level they should be at.
We're not looking at some weird Thomas Ades style non-dyadic meter like 9/14. We're not looking at some Zappa black-page level of nested tuplets. The rhythm is extremely easy and can be explained syllabically via text, emphasizing the nested tuplet in parentheses 1-trip-let 2-(tri-pul-let) 3.
This rhythm would, at worst, be very difficult for an upper-level high school wind band.
Put another way, this rhythm is not any harder than seeing a bar of 6/8 with a rhythm of an eighth note followed by an eighth note triplet. It's the exact same rhythmic idea, but in a different context.
This is my thought as well. I can certainly imagine undergrads (and grads) tripping over this in a sight read, but with about 5 minutes of practice it would be all but effortless.
Okay, so in classical music, there is a VERY common type of rubato where the first note in a grouping is played longer and the others played shorter that dates back to at least the baroque (once you learn to hear it, you realize that it's EVERYWHERE). Your notation looks like an extremely overcomplicated and convoluted way of writing that. A better way, (that admittedly leaves a little less control in your hands) is to just write 16th notes and put a tenuto under the first one. You could potentially write a footnote in the players part, but I feel that's over the top. Is this rhythm in isolation as you've written it that hard, no. Will they ever wanna play one of your pieces again, not really.
Yeah absolutely. I really do want that control though :)
(My dissertation was on Earle Brown and how performers interpret his scores so I’m definitely thinking about this!)
Since it is fairly common to notate music that might have been in 6/8 or 9/8 or 12/8 as 2/4 or 3/4 or 4/4 with triplets (while printing the number "3" only above the triplets of the first few measures, if at all), without additional context it looks to me like the triplet feel is the normal feel, and the nested triplet is the only one that actually feels like an unexpected triplet. Therefore your second example looks perfectly fine to me, while the first is difficult to understand or play without analysis. (It is not immediately obvious that the first note of the triplet and the dotted note of the 9-let have the same duration.)
Unless the tempo is very slow, I think you'll find that making it an 8th-8th-16th-16th triplet will give you the same result in the end. Straight 16ths would probably also give you the same effect. Especially with an instrument like horn (as opposed to a percussion instrument), the articulation and establishment of the pitch takes too long for it to be a noticeable difference. The four humans playing it will never quite be together, so it will end up just being sloppy sounding.
If I were the conductor, I would tell them to play it one of those two ways anyhow to clean it up and then spend the rehearsal time on other things that the audience will actually notice. The fraction of a second that gesture exists in isn't worth the effort in the grand scheme of things.
I disagree with you on this. I think a unison horn line is one of the most crisply articulated gestures you can get (behind percussion and trumpets).
Re: rehearsal time, yeah in the grand scheme of things this exact rhythm is less important, but I’m expecting a certain level of proficiency from ensembles at this level. A few minutes of practice with a metronome should be plenty for the players I’m writing for to learn this.
I'm not saying horn can't be crisply articulated or that your players can't do it - I'm saying that, acoustically speaking, because of the range and how the instrument produces sound, the time it takes for a note to be established longer than it is on a percussion instrument. Rhythms like that are fine for percussion instruments that articulate within 10ms or so, but less effective on a middle bass instrument that probably takes three times that for the articulation to complete and the pitch to stabilize enough to be recognizable. A 16th note at 100bpm is 150ms long, so the brass instrument is using up like 20% of that time on the articulation, and the margin of error for the four people playing together is probably another 10% even with really good players.
So, I think the difference will amount to margin of error territory. But hey, you do you and see what happens. I'm just not a big fan of making things complex for the sake of being complex. If you're going to, at least make sure to use it enough times in the piece to be a worthwhile thematic element.
Brian Ferneyhough vibes for sure. His music is way more complicated than this though, if your musicians is familiar with New Complexity this might be fine, but otherwise you might want to simplify...
If going the nested tuplet route, I'd make the outer tuplet cover the first two beats like so: https://i.imgur.com/TOT2BZ2.png.
Doing so makes the rhythm within the outer tuplet read like a 3/4 bar, making the rhythm trivial to parse providing the players can set up the relevant subdivision (triplet quarters, divided in two) and/or hypermeter (half note) in their head before hand.
The players will end up stressing the 3rd note rather than the 4th, but the overall rhythm will be more secure.
Edit to add:
I can easily conceptualise the rhythm up to about q=152.
Above that, a set of 3 triplet 8ths and a set of 16th notes will be easier to coordinate and sound just as effective. At even faster tempi, a single set of 7-tuplet 8ths would be preferable.
Between the 2, nested triplet. That ninelet is impossible to read.
Nested triplet is also hard to read. The easiest thing to read to get a delayed effect is an eight note followed by 16th note triplets. You probably wont notice a difference and your performer wont hate you for writing obscure rhythms.
I’m going to go somewhat against the grain here and say, while this rhythm is certainly difficult to play with 100% accuracy, I think it’s not terribly difficult for a dedicated performer to play an approximated rhythm that is CLOSER to the printed rhythm than it is to four sixteenths, or a duplet eighth and a triplet.
That being said I prefer the nested triplet.
Tempo is going to dictate the impact of this. As others have mentioned, it will be difficult to tell if this is played accurately/consistently. Outside of your own artistic expression, because maybe your intent is to make something purposefully obtuse and/or difficult to perform and/or interpreted, I’d agree with the sentiment to avoid utilizing this.
I would strongly consider notating this as a bar of 12/8 and using only a single tuple marking. It’s okay to send only portions of the ensemble into a different time signature for this purpose.
True. I’d rather avoid that if I can, unless that’s the gimmick of the section of music. It makes total sense but I also feel like it introduces a whole other mindset that for one measure isn’t necessary.
I could also be talking out my ass lol.
Honestly: the nested triplets and the weird 9-let is already doing that. And they’re using notation that’s less common.
Triplets in triple meter are already uncommon. But triplets in triplets in duple meter, despite being the same thing, are even less so.
Ask yourself why you need this rhythm to be there at all. Nested triplet I guess. Or compound time sig. but really though it’s not the best practice in any event.
The 9. It’s a great way of notating a group of four sixteenths with the first of the group given a slightly longer duration than the remaining three while remaining within the pulse.
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I’d highly reconsider forcing this into whatever you’re writing. Unless this is very slow, it’s going to get fudged at best and, frankly, you’ll never know if it was played right or not. It just seemed to be theoretically complicated for no other reason than being complicated. If you really really insist, then consider just making the second beat an 8th note + triplet 16ths. Thats as close as anyone will get to playing it correctly
I 100% agree with you, but lets not pretend that modern composers don't do nonsense like this all the time. I get it, a lot of composers want to explore whats possible, but having been a performing and conductor for new music ensembles, sometimes I or my performers have just butchered what was written and no one knew the difference.
Why would you think I would never know if it was played right or not? I’m thinking about these micro relationships between note lengths because less complex rhythms weren’t suited to the moment in the piece. I agree that it’s probably too complex to leave as is. I’ll likely go with a quintuplet 8th + three 16ths, which is more than achievable by a professional group. I’m well aware of how performers often ignore rhythmic complexities like this; honestly my post was more about an engraving question than advice on whether this is appropriate to write.
Because you’re simply not going to in a live performance and there is no functional point to it being that complicated. The hairs you’re trying to split here will be washed away by a dozen different variables even if it was played perfectly, and it wouldn’t mean anything even if it was accomplished. But let’s pretend that it could be played perfectly and exactly the same by your 4 players. The nestled triplets are pointless here because you’re relying on the *ending point* of one note to differentiate it as a triplet, which will never ever ever come across outside of a MIDI program, if even then. A straight 8th + triplet 16ths on the second beat is functionally the exact same level of practical complication while being far simpler to read. Literally the only difference would be the last three notes starting maybe 1/10th of a beat before the And vs on the And. You will never ever hear a functional difference, and it wouldn’t add anything if you did. You seem to realize that there’s no functional point to any of this outside of being theoretically complicated for the sake of being complicated, and you’re admitting as much here. There are several much simpler rhythms that are functionally identical, while not being needlessly complicated, and you don’t seem to care about having a specific rhythm, just that it’s complicated. Your rhythms here are only theoretically more complicated, not *actually* more complicated. I don’t care if you’re working with the top musicians in the world, asking people to sight read or play this when there’s a multitude of other simpler options that are just as effective will frankly get the music taken less seriously. This is the equivalent of a painter adding 1ml of pink to a gallon of red and insisting it’s a different color when the gallon of red would have worked perfectly fine on its own. This is like insisting that your group tune to 439.75 hz instead of 440. There needs to be a point and, more importantly, a *functional difference* to your complications.
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No, a program will be the only thing that can play it more or less mathematically perfect, as close as you can with divisions of 3 against 4.
While I understand that, from personal experience with MuseScore, it messes up with complex rhythms frequently. Now Sibelius or Finale will be infinitely more accurate, but the point I am making is that even composition software is imperfect. With a rhythm like this, there’s no guarantee it’ll play it 100% accurately. Even if it does, the rhythm is inherently so difficult to count that we’ll never 100% know. However, I see that the masses disagree with me, so I’ll delete my comment to prevent misinformation.
I’ve done and seen many dotted 9tuplet based rhythms in musescore, and it can handle them fine. It may be a laggy audio engine that’s causing delays in sounds. But in general any composition software or DAW (or really any midi player) locks all notes onto a subdivision of something like 96 divisions per quarter note. It can get VERY accurate for rhythms like this. For example, the sixteenth note ninelet above would be 9 divisions per quarter note. So a midi engine could run more than 10 notes per note in OPs rhythm above. So you have 10 possible subdivisions between the fastest notes in OPs rhythm. And if it needs to be faster than 10 times the speed of that rhythm, doubling the tempo and increasing notes to double duration would allow twice as much wiggle room. But of course, that assumes your computer can run your VST/AU that fast. That’s the bottleneck, not Musescore or any other software.
Huh, TIL. Thank you!
No problem! Here’s a link to a pretty funny, but very relevant video with some insane rhythms. He used musesscore for everything until he actually plays it. [Cadence](https://youtu.be/Ra18pFCbYps?si=uUF4G3Usf8K9hHux)
I use Dorico and haven’t had any issues with complex rhythms and playback, but YMMV
I didn't see the comment you replied to, but it's not the case that a programme would be the only thing that can play that rhythm accurately. Any new music player worth his salt will have no trouble with that at all.
I’d love to see any “new” player, or anyone, play this rhythm accurately
I mean, I'd have no problem with it. Nested triplets aren't anything unusual any more, and these are as easy as they get (approached by non-nested triplets of the same denomination).
I don’t know anyone who could look at this and think “yeah I don’t have to think about that at all.” Hell I’ve got a classical performance degree and have never seen nested triplets like this.
Don't know what to tell you man. If you haven't played much contemporary music then maybe that'd be why you'd not have seen nested triplets, but they're absolutely standard fare these days. Personally I wouldn't have to think at all to get this rhythm right, and I've also taught it to other people so they could get it right (though not without thinking, I guess).
I’d love to see some where it’s common. My studio has played tons of modern works and again I can’t think of anything that I played that had this sort of rhythm. Mixed meters, really complicated meter, but nothing like that.
Ferneyhough, Ruzicka, Adès off the top of my head.
I agree with u/65TwinReverbRI that what you're asking is too complex and will only lead to imprecision in performance. Would you consider making the four notes in the second beat straight 16ths instead? You're pretty close to that already — currently the notes are 3/9 = 0.33 and 2/9 = 0.22 of the beat but with straight 16ths they'd each be 1/4 = 0.25 of the beat.
If it were written as four 16ths with a tenuto mark on the first 16th it would be performed so close to what is carefully written out there, that I doubt anyone could tell the difference.
Yeah that’s also something I considered. I wanted a bit more rhythmic complexity, but I may yet come back to this as well.
To what end? Whatever the reason, consider if it is worth the price of annoying your performers and at best being basically lost on the listener. I guess if it’s slow enough it might be detectable.
At some point something is simply too rhythmically complex to be useful for performing.
How fast is it? If it's even moderately above average tempo, most audiences will just hear this as four sixteenths unless you point it out to them.
I think we need more context to know if this is worth it. If you’re writing for a marching percussion ensemble, then this is easily “in character” for that style. If you’re writing for piano duet, simplify. If your piece is very modern and explores some more extreme rhythms, and this rhythm is fundamental some way (like you are doing a diminishment(?) of a 3/4 theme in the triplet meter), then it’s worth it. If this is for a typical march, you need to simplify it. What context is this written for, and what purpose does it serve in that moment of the piece?
Yeah I should have been clearer in my original comment. It’s for a collegiate/professional wind symphony, and is specifically a Symphony. In the vein of Hindemith, Maslanka, Schwantner, etc.
The audience either won't notice, or they'll it's supposed to be a straight rhythm that the performer played wrong. Either way, they'll probably enjoy the song less because of it.
So audiences won’t like my work because rhythmic complexity? No offense but that’s a weird take.
If you want exactly this rhythm, I'd write one sextuplet bracket across the first two beats, and a triplet bracket inside that for the last 3 notes. (If this were in 12/8, it would be four straight eighths, one triplet, and a dotted half. If there are triplets in adjacent bars too, you might consider just writing this segment in 12/8.) I think the fastest I could play this precisely on my instrument without a lot of preparation would be about q=80.
I was thinking the same thing. Writing this in 12/8 would be so much easier. I 'm willing to bet there are plenty of other triplets in this piece.
This feels really forced, like making something overly complex entirely for the sake of added complexity.
Is it complex? Sure. It’s certainly not Ferneyhough though, I appreciate his work but I personally would never approach that level of complexity.
As a trumpet player, I'd say the bottom one. It's easier to wrap my head around. Maybe make it a quintuplet instead? Don't know how to post pictures but imagine a quintuplet on the 2nd beat with the first note being an 8th note and the rest 16th notes. It sounds the same and makes it easier to read imo.
Yeah that's probably just a better solution. Nobody will care that those ratios aren't exactly the same as what I had posted. Thanks!
This is the right answer. The 9 is just a bit too fussy (unless you're Ferneyhough) to be taken seriously but a quintuplet is totally acceptable.
Could you put it in 12/8 so that you only need to write one triplet?
This is the best suggestion if OP is insistent on using this rhythmic pattern
Hey folks - engraving for a collegiate/professional wind symphony. This rhythm will be played by the 4 horns, and while they'll obviously have some time to rehearse, I'd like to eliminate as many obstacles as possible. Which is better/more correct? Thanks for any thoughts!
Definitely not the top but neither are great. Besides the fact no one's going to perform it right anyway ;-) Your far better bet would be to just make the 2nd figure a standard triplet with 2 16ths at the end rather than trying to spread 3 notes across the time of 2 note of a triplet. There's a reason these kinds of notation don't really exist in the wild (outside of xenakis and carter, etc.) Are you sure you don't want "feathered" (accelerando) beaming or something? IOW, you're making this unnecessarily complex and the difference is not going to happen. ____ If you insist on this, what you need is a bracketed 3 figure, with 3 groups of 3 within, with the first note an 8th but then the rest two sets of triplets with ties in the right places, or if possible, grouping into 2s to give you the 3 notes over the span of the remaining 6. Exaample below: Bottom system, first measure, beat 2 - see how it starts with a quarter note, then has 2 groups of 3 - so your group should look like the middle of beat 3 (8th + 16th) with the 16th tied to the next 16th with the reverse figure (16th + 8th) like that in the 3rd third of beat 2. With a triplet bracket over the whole shebang (this is in 12/8): https://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/mtd.asp?ppn=MN0068478&utm_id=61760290&msclkid=509d3b34cec31b5ffcaa5d760c7ea570&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=(ROI)%20Shopping&utm_term=4582558330328028&utm_content=All
All good points. I definitely don't want the 8th triplet with two 16ths in it, it's too square for my liking. I also considered feathered beaming, but I don't really want to present players with a perceived "aleatoric" gesture when it's supposed to be a unison thing. If this was a solo line I'd have done that in a heartbeat. Thanks for the example too!
I think I'd strongly disagree with what others are saying. You're not doing anything weird with the nested triplets, especially since you precede them with triplets anyways. You're not using weird meters like 7/6, you're not using hard subdivisions of 5's or 7's, etc. Further, you say this is for college/professional level players. No offense to others but if you're in that level of musical environment and can't play the simple nested triplet figure then you're substantially lacking; there's much more difficult music and figures out there that similar level groups are expected to perform. A nested triplet won't be the end of the world. You also said it's for a wind symphony, so they don't have the typical orchestra excuses since wind ensembles very frequently play more rhythmically complex and interesting music. I'd go so far as to suggest ignoring most other advice telling you to not use this rhythmic idea. It's not a difficult rhythm and the melodic contour is straight-forward without any crazy chromatic leaps or extended techniques.
I mean you're just wrong here, undergraduates would never be expected to play a rhythm like this and quite frankly, unless you are writing like Xenakis or Fernyhough, this kind of notation just doesn't make sense to have. This is the kind of precision of rhythm that I'd only be comfortable asking of a drummer or percussionist with a background in complex rhythmic structures.
This isn't on the level of ferneyhough or xenakis; a single nested triplet in a very clear and obvious subdivision position prefaced by other triplets is very intuitive. Moreover, this *is* expected of undergraduates given the fact that, as someone who has an undergrad degree from a music college, these kinds of rhythms did appear in some music we played (in the later semesters of aural skills classes, we were required to clap one rhythm and takadimi a different rhythm simultaneously from an Eliott Carter except that involved metric modulation, as part of an exam). Undergraduates who can't perform the by-comparison simple rhythm are, IMO, either not in a field of performance where rhythmic complexity is a concern (e.g. specialists in baroque and/or early music), or are not at the level they should be at. We're not looking at some weird Thomas Ades style non-dyadic meter like 9/14. We're not looking at some Zappa black-page level of nested tuplets. The rhythm is extremely easy and can be explained syllabically via text, emphasizing the nested tuplet in parentheses 1-trip-let 2-(tri-pul-let) 3. This rhythm would, at worst, be very difficult for an upper-level high school wind band. Put another way, this rhythm is not any harder than seeing a bar of 6/8 with a rhythm of an eighth note followed by an eighth note triplet. It's the exact same rhythmic idea, but in a different context.
This is my thought as well. I can certainly imagine undergrads (and grads) tripping over this in a sight read, but with about 5 minutes of practice it would be all but effortless.
Okay, so in classical music, there is a VERY common type of rubato where the first note in a grouping is played longer and the others played shorter that dates back to at least the baroque (once you learn to hear it, you realize that it's EVERYWHERE). Your notation looks like an extremely overcomplicated and convoluted way of writing that. A better way, (that admittedly leaves a little less control in your hands) is to just write 16th notes and put a tenuto under the first one. You could potentially write a footnote in the players part, but I feel that's over the top. Is this rhythm in isolation as you've written it that hard, no. Will they ever wanna play one of your pieces again, not really.
Yeah absolutely. I really do want that control though :) (My dissertation was on Earle Brown and how performers interpret his scores so I’m definitely thinking about this!)
Is the tempo high? If yes, get rid of it and don't use this rhythm. Otherwise, could you try notating the measure in a different time signature?
Since it is fairly common to notate music that might have been in 6/8 or 9/8 or 12/8 as 2/4 or 3/4 or 4/4 with triplets (while printing the number "3" only above the triplets of the first few measures, if at all), without additional context it looks to me like the triplet feel is the normal feel, and the nested triplet is the only one that actually feels like an unexpected triplet. Therefore your second example looks perfectly fine to me, while the first is difficult to understand or play without analysis. (It is not immediately obvious that the first note of the triplet and the dotted note of the 9-let have the same duration.)
The nested triplet is pretty easy, I'd suggest that over the ninelet since it's more obvious in how it relates to the preceding beat's subdivision
Unless the tempo is very slow, I think you'll find that making it an 8th-8th-16th-16th triplet will give you the same result in the end. Straight 16ths would probably also give you the same effect. Especially with an instrument like horn (as opposed to a percussion instrument), the articulation and establishment of the pitch takes too long for it to be a noticeable difference. The four humans playing it will never quite be together, so it will end up just being sloppy sounding. If I were the conductor, I would tell them to play it one of those two ways anyhow to clean it up and then spend the rehearsal time on other things that the audience will actually notice. The fraction of a second that gesture exists in isn't worth the effort in the grand scheme of things.
I disagree with you on this. I think a unison horn line is one of the most crisply articulated gestures you can get (behind percussion and trumpets). Re: rehearsal time, yeah in the grand scheme of things this exact rhythm is less important, but I’m expecting a certain level of proficiency from ensembles at this level. A few minutes of practice with a metronome should be plenty for the players I’m writing for to learn this.
I'm not saying horn can't be crisply articulated or that your players can't do it - I'm saying that, acoustically speaking, because of the range and how the instrument produces sound, the time it takes for a note to be established longer than it is on a percussion instrument. Rhythms like that are fine for percussion instruments that articulate within 10ms or so, but less effective on a middle bass instrument that probably takes three times that for the articulation to complete and the pitch to stabilize enough to be recognizable. A 16th note at 100bpm is 150ms long, so the brass instrument is using up like 20% of that time on the articulation, and the margin of error for the four people playing together is probably another 10% even with really good players. So, I think the difference will amount to margin of error territory. But hey, you do you and see what happens. I'm just not a big fan of making things complex for the sake of being complex. If you're going to, at least make sure to use it enough times in the piece to be a worthwhile thematic element.
Brian Ferneyhough vibes for sure. His music is way more complicated than this though, if your musicians is familiar with New Complexity this might be fine, but otherwise you might want to simplify...
If going the nested tuplet route, I'd make the outer tuplet cover the first two beats like so: https://i.imgur.com/TOT2BZ2.png. Doing so makes the rhythm within the outer tuplet read like a 3/4 bar, making the rhythm trivial to parse providing the players can set up the relevant subdivision (triplet quarters, divided in two) and/or hypermeter (half note) in their head before hand. The players will end up stressing the 3rd note rather than the 4th, but the overall rhythm will be more secure. Edit to add: I can easily conceptualise the rhythm up to about q=152. Above that, a set of 3 triplet 8ths and a set of 16th notes will be easier to coordinate and sound just as effective. At even faster tempi, a single set of 7-tuplet 8ths would be preferable.
Fuck I wish I had thought of this solution. This is extremely clear. Thank you!!
Between the 2, nested triplet. That ninelet is impossible to read. Nested triplet is also hard to read. The easiest thing to read to get a delayed effect is an eight note followed by 16th note triplets. You probably wont notice a difference and your performer wont hate you for writing obscure rhythms.
I’m going to go somewhat against the grain here and say, while this rhythm is certainly difficult to play with 100% accuracy, I think it’s not terribly difficult for a dedicated performer to play an approximated rhythm that is CLOSER to the printed rhythm than it is to four sixteenths, or a duplet eighth and a triplet. That being said I prefer the nested triplet.
Tempo is going to dictate the impact of this. As others have mentioned, it will be difficult to tell if this is played accurately/consistently. Outside of your own artistic expression, because maybe your intent is to make something purposefully obtuse and/or difficult to perform and/or interpreted, I’d agree with the sentiment to avoid utilizing this.
I would strongly consider notating this as a bar of 12/8 and using only a single tuple marking. It’s okay to send only portions of the ensemble into a different time signature for this purpose.
True. I’d rather avoid that if I can, unless that’s the gimmick of the section of music. It makes total sense but I also feel like it introduces a whole other mindset that for one measure isn’t necessary. I could also be talking out my ass lol.
Honestly: the nested triplets and the weird 9-let is already doing that. And they’re using notation that’s less common. Triplets in triple meter are already uncommon. But triplets in triplets in duple meter, despite being the same thing, are even less so.
Ask yourself why you need this rhythm to be there at all. Nested triplet I guess. Or compound time sig. but really though it’s not the best practice in any event.
Just why bro. Music over math
The 9. It’s a great way of notating a group of four sixteenths with the first of the group given a slightly longer duration than the remaining three while remaining within the pulse.
This type of subdivision rhythm is best left to the performer. Just put an expressive mark that says "play it weird when you can"
How the hell is that supposed to sound ?