From Leonard Ornstein's Tarantelle (1963)
Unlike pedal markings, these are above the bottom staff. I feel like it could be phrasing, but that's normally indicated by the beaming of the notes. What do these groupings mean?
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@AndrewLi That would make sense if this was 9/8.– OkoyosMar 16, 2018 at 5:43
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1 Answer
It is phrasing. It's a kind of regrouping of the beats in the left hand, from 4 beats in the bar to 3. It's much more visual using the brackets than just using phrase marks.
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1Wouldn't this normally be notated using note beaming? I think that would be equally as visual.– OkoyosMar 16, 2018 at 9:45
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@Okoyos note beaming is usually broken at the start of each beat. I have seen beaming,e.g., of groups of 6 16th notes in 4/4 time, but that's a bit easier to interpret than beaming eighth notes in 6/8 or 12/8 time. Mar 16, 2018 at 11:19
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1@Okoyos it occurs to me also that, since this is a piano piece, beaming the LH part but not the RH part would make it visually tough to identify synchronized notes. Mar 16, 2018 at 11:21
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1@Okoyos Yeah, if this were written by Bartók I think it would definitely be shown with a beaming pattern. But not everyone likes that notation method because it can be hard to read. It looks to me that this composer is trying to find a compromise that preserves the readability of proper 12/8 beam patterns but still shows the anti-metric grouping. It also might be someone dealing with a notation program that can’t do the other beaming easily—note the strangely uncentered 12/8, this doesn’t look like a high quality program. Mar 16, 2018 at 11:59
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@PatMuchmore Also included in Tarantelle are some double beaming in the left hand. I would think that also signifies phrasing, so it seems odd that they would have two different ways of expressing phrasing. Why do you think that is?– OkoyosMar 16, 2018 at 12:31