Multiple slurs between chords

• Feb 2, 2023 - 22:53

In MS3 when there were chords with slurs between multiple noteheads on the cords, entering one slur line and a second usually resulted in two superimposed lines. You could click the line pair and hit x and you would separate the lines on up and one down. If you had multiple lines, you could also select a line and drag it off the superimposed set. So you could get three and even four lines if necessary and if there was also a tie, it would fit in. In MS4 I cannot get multiple slur lines. Adding a second just does not show up using either the slur in the menu bar or clicking on the slur in the palettes after selecting notes. I just get a single slur line. Only thing that worked was to highlight a slur and do copy/paste. Certainly this is not the only way so what am I doing incorrectly? Also slurs, and other lines, hairpins etc used to be set by selecting the start note and CTRL on the end note/rest +1. The line would then be placed from selected not to whatever came before the note indicated with CTRL. This no longer seems to work and lines extend to include the one selected with CTRL.

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• Jul 16, 2023 - 06:11

I don't have an answer, but I am having the same problem and it's driving me bonkers. I've spent the last hour trying to figure it out for one chord change in a piano part. I tried using multiple voices and hiding flags, but I couldn't get the slurs to be in the right position. They always anchored to the wrong note and every time I tried to move one of the slurs when I was able to get multiple slurs for one voice, it would select the entire measure.

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• Sep 27, 2023 - 12:14

They were probably ties not slurs. It is very unusual to have slurs between individual notes of adjacent chords. There is usually only a single slur between adjacent chords Musescore does put ties between individual notes of adjacent chords.

To quote Elaine Gould in "Behind bars": "All notes on one stem take a single slur, and not a slur to each note."

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• Nov 16, 2023 - 18:09

I strongly disagree. I see double slurs all the time, in a variety of contexts. It's true that I have a lot of music originally printed between 1800-1950, and tastes change. Still, here are uses I have seen in more than one piano score form different publishers, in the last week

  1. Grace notes: A grace note is usually drawn with a slur to the specific note it modifies. Likewise, with grace note chords, when warranted, I see (at least) two slurs, showing (at least) where the upper and lower grace notes "go"

  2. Ordinary chords: the same principle applies. Sometimes it is desirable to clarify how to relate individual notes of adjacent chords. I'm interpreting the results to make sense of them, but I think all of these are common, usually between two (or a small number of) chords.
    (a) Disjoint Motion: for example, two note-chords where both notes move by leaps and perhaps in opposite directions, so that the single slur does not clearly delineate the effect of the phrasing
    (b) Voice Leading: in situations where the motion between adjacent notes produces important harmonic voice leading, the phrasing may be emphasized in both the upper and lower "voice".
    (c) Tracking a part: I find this a lot in popular sheet music from 20s-50s. They are usually transparent 4-part reductions with (from the bottom up)
    -- bass line (boom)
    -- chordal accompaniment (chuck)
    -- interior harmony
    -- melody
    Each of these "parts' may contain chords or single notes, may cross the range of other parts, or may use multiple voices within a part. When one part becomes busy, double slurs are used to clarify the upper and lower origin and destination notes, to avoid confounding it with other parts.

  3. Visual flow Well-organized visual cues make scores easy to read. Courtesy accidentals, verbose and "reminder" fingerings, detailed (possibly redundant) phrase marks -- judiciously chosen-- can all improve the readability of a score. Which is all that matters. It seems obvious that double-phrase marks I see are chosen in the final analysis because they aid in reading the score. We recognize the flexibility of rules in other instances (like courtesy accidentals which are by definition superfluous), and I'd love to have the same flexibility here. It may seem meaningless to some users, but piano music can be very dense, and engravers have used a variety of clever techniques to both
    -- limit as much as possible the number of distinct voices needed to express a musical idea, and
    --preserve as much information as possible about the phrasing, articulations, and interrelations among the implied voices

I can provide pictures of all the cases if necessary.

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• Nov 19, 2023 - 19:08

I'd like to make a distinction between common cases, and common practice. When I see the same practice regularly, across different decades, styles, quality of score, and publishers, I no longer consider that practice to be uncommon in the sense "non-standard". It may be more verbose, or it may simply address in a standard way, an uncommon situation. For phrase marks, I think this is intuitively obvious in at least two cases:

  1. At the piano (or any reduction), where different notes under one stem may be (with reductions "are invariably") different voices. Publishes draw whatever phrasing they see as necessary or desirable, and short of writing all piano music with a forest of stems, there will always be cases where a second slur is desirable but splitting the voices is not.
  2. With grace notes, where by nearly universal practice a slur is drawn to the specific note being modified. Grace-note chords are less common, and are often simple cases (e.g. in thirds), but nothing prevents the destination notes from being ambiguous. And standard practice would then be, to clarify.

(I'm making a case because currently in Musescore I can't make this choice)

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• Nov 19, 2023 - 22:46

It is do-able in Musescore:

The examples of slurs under a phrase marking are trivially easy. Just select the notes of the phrase as a range and add the slur, then go back and select the notes under the slur and add that slur. To get this

SlurWithinPhrase.jpg

Step 1 click on note on beat 1
Step 2 shift + click on note on beat 4
Step 3 press S - this creates the phrase mark
Step 4 click on note on beat 2
Step 5 press S - this creates the slur
Step 6 adjust the centre of the phrase mark to clear the slur.

The case where the notes are within a chord and are therefore necessarily the same length makes it difficult to have different sized range selections. But it can be done by adding another note on beat 3 and making a slur from beat 1 to beat three and another slur from beat 1 to beat two.

The steps are shown here:

DoubleSlur.jpg

[Edit]
In a real life case, there would probably be another note nearby that can be temporarily slurred to and therefore steps 2 and 7 would not be needed.

[Edit 2] See also
https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/issues/17535

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