Re: Tremolo positioning

[Joe Neeman]

On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 14:39, Joshua Parmenter wrote:
> This is described in Matt Stone's book "Music Notation in the 20th
> Century" (not just 20th century music notation, but the practices of
> notation in the 20th century):
>
> "The tremolo bars should be thinner than beams, and as long or a
> little longer than the width of a note-head
> On beamed notes, the tremolo bars usually slant sightly more than the
> beams
> Note that the tremolo bars always slant upward, regardless of beam-
> slant"
>
> Mostly, you want to avoid them looking like beams that didn't print
> correctly... so, avoiding tremolos parallel to the beams is of
> importance. When the beams are at the same angle that the tremolos
> would be, then the tremolos are adjusted slightly to avoid this.
>
> I can scan the page tonight if that would help.
I think it would be most helpful if you could find a printed example of music 
that shows this -- regardless of what Matt Stone says, I don't think I have 
ever seen a tremolo slanted in the opposite direction of a beam. He must cite 
some references -- maybe you can find an example there.

One of my previous examples was the Bartok solo violin sonata (which couldn't 
have been typeset before 1947) and it has downward slanting tremolos on 
downward slanting beams (parallel to the beam). I just picked up a Kalmus 
edition of Ravel Introduction and Allegro (Violin 2), typeset at the 
beginning of the 20th century, and it also has tremolos parallel to beams 
even when beams slant downward.

Slightly unrelated, but now that you have me peering closely at tremolo 
flags... all the examples I have on hand have rectangular tremolo flags on 
beamed notes and parallelogram tremolo flags (what we do now) on unbeamed 
notes. Also the flags on beamed notes are much shorter than on unbeamed notes 
(about 60-70% the width).

Joe