Beam slope indicating accelerando or rallentando
Has anybody ever heard of a modern composition notation convention where sloping beams indicate acc. and rall.? A composer colleague of mine who always uses flat horizontal beams claims this (without any special notes in the prefaces to the music). Is there any documentary evidence for such a thing? Do post WWII musicians really read this extra semantic layer into beaming as a matter of course and standard practice? I confess to being very surprised to hear this. I am not referring to modern feathered beams, which are used for acc. and rall.
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I suppose this is what you mean:
That is standard. I have played music with that notation and I have also composed music myself with that notation.
If you mean something else you better include an image of what you mean.
Tilting beams to indicate changing tempo is not standard practice.
It might be warranted for a composition with a plethora of gradual tempo changes, but it discards the many well thought out rules for beaming (dozens of pages in Gardner Read's "Music Notation"), and thus harms readability.
For a piece with that many tempo changes, better to renotate it as individual note durations in a constant tempo.
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