bizarre piano notation

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NiftyBoy

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in jeux d'eau by ravel, there's a weird notation that i can't quite figure out.

for the left hand there's a B. then below it there's a stemless E and stemless E#. over all of this is a line that goes from the E, up through the B, then to the E#.

i've just been playing the e as a cue-note to the e#, but i'm not sure if that's right.

can someone help me out here?
 

NiftyBoy

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it's not a legato line. it's *kinda* positioned like its the stems for the Es, but it's thinner and curves through the B. it curves UP, not down.

here's a crappy mspaint representation:
 

Gir

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Apr 23, 2000
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Maybe it's some kind of trimonolo (or something in Italian like that), where you very quickly play those notes before or after (or maybe before ánd after) a single note, without actually counting them. It's only used for the 'effect'.
 

tarquin

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Oct 11, 2000
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I'm confused because you say 'curved line' but in your pic the lines are straight and diagonal.

The picture you've posted is standard but rare notation, so if it's this I can tell you what it means:

Both notes are to be played at once, the E and the E#. They're side by side simply because they live in the same position on the stave so they can't both be directly beneath the B.
It's an extension of the convention for, say, an A and a B in the same chord, where the notes are either side of the stem.

It's seen mainly in modern music. Bartok, for example.

Oh yeah, E and E# together will sound bloody awful at first. That's modern classical music for you. Then again, modern pop sometimes sounds bloody awful ;). And a lot of Bach's harmonies take a while to sink in :)
 

tarquin

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Bartok, Mikrokosmos volume 6, No 140.

both notes have equal length & sound at the same time. it's just a very squished chord.
:)

[edit]oops. forgot to scale down!
 

WebSlinger

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bah! everyone wants a chord named after them. Wagner re-notates a half-diminished 7th chord, and everyone calls it the Tristan Chord, next thing ya know you have composers writing odd harmonic representations all over the place!

ok, ok, i'm kidding, artistic enharmonic note placement goes waaaay back to early western polyphony.

heh, not bad for a "throat" huh? At least SOME singers pay a LITTLE attention in theory and history class.
 

NiftyBoy

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k you were right, tarquin :)

so i guess it's written that way to emphasize the dissonance or somethin? i'm pretty sure its not for clarity, since you could go either way with the natural and sharp and still produce the same chord...
 

tarquin

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Haven't heard of the Tristan chord. can't find anything about it in my music dictionary. What is it?

There's a Steely Dan chord :D

The chord in the pic I posted ^^ could be written as C and D flat which would look less messy, but Bartok may be following a particular scale which would require C and C#.
 

WebSlinger

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Originally posted by tarquin
Haven't heard of the Tristan chord. can't find anything about it in my music dictionary. What is it?
/me falls over dead.
New Harvard Dictionary of Music
The first chord sounded in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and prominent elsewhere in the work: f-b-d#'-g#' . Although it can be described as a half-diminished seventh chord, its function in the terms of harmonic analysis has been a matter of dispute.
 

tarquin

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/me bows down to WS's knowledge of opera.

I like semi-diminished chords :D
I like calling it semi-diminished (or half-diminished, whatever) even better than calling it "minor 7 flattened 5" which is far too much of a mouthful.