Garden (string trio)

Undoing time.

Hi Luis,

The only commentary I have for you is notation-related. The writing itself really worked for me.

You may want to run Finale's Cautionary Accidental plugin on this (but turn off parenthesize courtesy accidentals). You're missing at least one natural after your invisible bar lines. Check Violin at the top system of p. 2, the D-flat to D-natural. There may be others.

Also, a couple of spellings strike me as odd. G-flat to A-natural in Violin middle of p. 2. F-flat to G-sharp(?) to E-natural in Violin on p. 3. With strings, my general rule is try to make the intervals look as obvious as possible. If possible, spell a half step as a m2 instead of a +1. Similar, three half steps should be spelled as a m3 not a +2, and two half steps as a M2 not a -3. The reason is that, when reading, string players rely on the interval to judge how far to move up or down the string.

(That said, all this goes out the window if the piece is intended to be played using Just Intonation or similar. In that case, an explanatory note might be warranted.)

Thanks, your comments are essential for me, I'll rework the notation right now...

Regarding the accidentals I think it's fixed now. Working without measures (in Finale) is something new for me, I'm still learning, so thanks again...

But regarding the intervals I'm not sure... I understand what you say about the players, and it's something to have in mind. However this is an exercise on composition and what I am asked is to keep the interval relationships when transposing, etc... I'll work on it, too.

18 hours ago, Luis Hernández said:

Regarding the accidentals I think it's fixed now. Working without measures (in Finale) is something new for me, I'm still learning, so thanks again...

But regarding the intervals I'm not sure... I understand what you say about the players, and it's something to have in mind. However this is an exercise on composition and what I am asked is to keep the interval relationships when transposing, etc... I'll work on it, too.

First, if you have a teacher who wants a specific approach to spelling for academic purposes, go with that. You can always make your spellings easier for the player to read once you've worked with the teacher on getting the theory right.

Second, regarding Finale, you always have to be super careful when working without measures because it's something Finale isn't designed to do. Invisible bar lines are just a hack. Finale is still "thinking" in measures behind the scenes, so all the things like accidentals are still measure-based. It just takes careful proofreading every time.

Also, when using notation without barlines, make sure that the accidental that is supposed to apply to a particular note isn't ambiguous. For example, if you have an F# followed by another F# a little later, I would make sure that both have the sharp on them, even if in music with barlines the second F# would just be implied.