An apology to Sir Colin

[Mario]

Yes tonic dominant would be the obvious selection . In the A flat slow movt the timps play during the C major section only

Curses! Haven't studied modulations yet - I'll try and work it out.

Mario

[Mario]

Get outta here! But the way RBL and United currently play, I don't think it will be dull.....

Okay! Okay! Okay! Just asking...

Mario

[Ein Heldenleben]

Curses! Haven't studied modulations yet - I'll try and work it out.

Mario

The modulation from A flat to C major in that slow movt is so typical of LvB’s genius . He uses the G flat in bar 27 to enharmonically shift to an f sharp which is the leading note to get into a Cmajor 6-4 chord . God he was a talent

[oliver sudden]

I stumbled across this while scrolling through the forum to see what I’ve missed what with being new here.

It is indeed a most extraordinary question. Measured demisemiquavers make no sense at semibreve=120 (if my calculations are right that would be 64 strikes per second, although the minim only lasts a quarter of a second), so the distinction between tremolo and roll would seem to be meaningless. (Indeed the distinction between quaver tremolo and roll in the timps in the preceding pages is already dubious enough.)

Fortunately the manuscript is available nowadays on IMSLP for all with internet access to see.

https://imslp.org/wiki/Symphony_No.5...en,_Ludwig_van)

I wish I could upload a picture: all I see here is a first attempt at writing…something, presumably a roll, scribbled out and replaced with the roll notated with the trill symbol. Someone back then seems to have transcribed that as the bizarre thing we see nowadays in every edition, Beethoven (and everyone else at the time) seems not to have picked it up, and now we have just a couple of conductors making what seems to me to be an absolutely bizarre pedantic point.

And this in one of the most popular symphonies of all.

Thanks for posting it!

[Simon B]

This maybe?



Good luck to the copyist charged with deciphering that - or the score in general! To my eyes it looks like he started off with a trill for the full note value (faint, right hand side) and subsequently seems to have deliberately done... something else.

Anyone who's studied timps beyond about Grade V will almost certainly have encountered B5 in excerpt books and is quite likely to have performed it at some stage.

The "What the... does that mean?!" re the last bar is one of those perennial and unanswerable questions.

Literally executing the note values of the tremolo in this instance is usually going to be implausible for reasons already pointed out.

In general, whether any distinction is made between rolls implied by tremolo type notations versus trills is on an "apply artistic judgement" handy-wavy sort of basis dependent on context, era and the current length of a piece of string. Where a distinction is implemented it's sometimes more a question of articulate versus blended roll rather than anything to do with the actual roll rate. That is, play a different distance from the edge or with a different amount of tension (or different sticks in situations different to the B5 example in which this isn't possible).

When I've blagged my way through B5, the conductor has never mentioned it either way but I've usually attempted to do... something or other to reflect what the part actually says - a sudden transition from something drier and more articulate to a blended roll.

Meanwhile, what professional timpanists do mostly seems to be nothing very noticeable except when conductors want to make a point about it. One of the current LSO timpanists is an acquaintance so if I remember I'll ask him what they do when I get a chance.