You'll need a new thread for that, and given your coy response to Evan just now, I suspect you may be willing to shed some light.



I want to talk about this too, though -- I find that my 'melodic lines' seem to call for ever changing durations, and I have trouble notating them. The closest I came was with my trombone solo, the score of which can be found on my website. But it's using incomplete tuplets, dots, and double dots, some tempo shifts... in other words, perfectly conventional notation. I am interested in what you are doing in this regard, and why you think incomplete tuplets are somehow more forbidding than other solutions.

Don't forget I'm talking about each duration being subtly distinguishable from those around it... a string of single "tuplets" looks pretty inelegant in my opinion. I'm afraid I don't really have anything concrete to say about possible solutions at this point though.

You're right, I don't really want to.

There's always the multi-voice option preferred by KK Huebler in his piano piece Sonnetto LXXXIII -- I don't know how precise performers try to be when executing these lines, but the result is sure to be irregular in an interesting way. One could also use larger values and slow the whole thing down, with perhaps engaging results.

I wonder if there would be a way to link that in with 'traditional' codes of rubato and their associated typical Schreibweisen then... or is there another kind of irregular but not just irregular you had in mind?

Well it's pointless in the context of the work in question, but it brings up the possibility of combinations of these metrical subdivisions (he uses triangles for third-notes, squares for fifth-notes, diamonds for seventh-notes and oblongs for ninth-notes - there are also notations for eleventh, thirteenth and fifteenth notes but they aren't used in Fabric) which aren't as rigidly aligned and grouped as they are in Cowell's score (e.g. two triplet quavers followed by a single quintuplet semiquaver and three septuplet crotchets). I don't think that Cowell ever really applied this in this sense (correct me if I'm wrong - my knowledge of Cowell's oeuvre is not comprehensive!), though the Quartet Romantic takes it as far as Fabric goes.
Full details of the system are also in New Musical Resources.
When I wrote my recent piano piece, I was using multiples of quintuplets and nontuplets and used very short bars with new metrical time signatures for each bar (1/8, 1/10, 2/9 etc.) The notation looked awkward and jerky, but that's compatible with the nature of the piece. When I wanted to suggest a higher level of fluidity, I've beamed across the barlines.
Another solution that I've used in the past is to just have incomplete tuplets, but I've never been sure about this as an approach.

Rules are made to be broken, what!

But is there much of a public for this sort of thing? - that is what we worry about. What would Brahms have done? we wonder . . . .

I'm sure some of them couldn't actually read a simpler score anyway, hh! Don't give them any ammo, I say.