Ah, yes…that’s the one…I still have to get me a hold of some Ferneyhough to hear what this sounds like. And I misremembered it … his time signature was x/10, not an odd number (but not a power of two, either.) Still, if you could write it over ten, you can write something over five.
Fish-That sort of swing notation has always peeved me…it’s way too extreme (in most cases) to notate two eighths as a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth (I don’t think I’ve ever seen dotted-quarter/eighth like you mention.) A bit more accurate is the other common convention, which notates two eighths as a triplet consisting of a quarter followed by an eighth. (So the swing value is distributed 66/33 rather than 75/25.) Most musicians won’t get confused either way, but still… I just don’t like it.
I’ll hazard a guess why you don’t like it (I don’t either):
It’s too busy looking. When you’ve got a triplet quarter with a triplet eighth, you have to use a bracket. This looks really ugly when you’re doing it throughout the entire piece.
I definitely prefer a simple “swing” designation at the top and plain eighths written.
As long as we’re nitpicking (heh), I read a biography of Bernstein in which he was reported as saying Sondheim did write a couple of the numbers on his own. But he didn’t say which ones! Fun to speculate: “Officer Krupke”, maybe?
If I remember the song right, pulykamell, it was “Only the Good Die Young” and written Q Q = Q. E and notated shuffle beat. “52nd Street” may have been noted Q Q = E_E E, although I can’t recall at the moment. (I haven’t actually needed the sheet for those songs in years.)
My MIDI program could adjust 4/4 time to any degree of shuffle you indicated from 50% to 75%.
True. I tried to come up with a better term in my post to convey my thought and finally settled on ‘triplet’ which I realize is playing fast and loose with the term.
s’possible. I doubt anything like “Maria” or “There’s A Place For Us” were actually composed by Sondheim. The hard part is that Sondheim doesn’t even sound like Sondheim, from show to show. It’s not like sticking an overwrought ALW ballad in, say, Avenue Q.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s very silly to try to notate swing. In a jazz chart, it would simply be written as 1/8 notes. The only reasonable way to do it is to just write 1/8 notes and write “swing” over it. If ‘legit’ players don’t know how to swing, you aren’t gonna get them to do it right by writing triplets. You either can swing or you can’t.
Don’t know if anyone’s mentioned it, but I’ve seen swing written in 4/4 with an indication right at the beginning of the piece:
dotted eighth bracketed to sixteenth = quarter and eighth as a one-beat triplet
_____ --3--
| -| = | |`
o. o o o
(Sorry, that was horrible.)
But it makes the point pretty well, right at the beginning of the piece, and you’re not stuck constantly writing triplet brackets over everything, which is a pain.
