History of triplets
I was wondering about triplets : when and where were they used for the first time in scores? More generally, when were triplets used significantly (i.e. not one single time on one particular score, but used several times by many composers)?
As an example for what I'm looking for, here is an appearance of a triplet in the Grande valse brillante in E-flat major, Op. 18, composed by Frédéric Chopin:
According to Oxford Music Online, « the slur and figure used in this way do occur in the 16th century, but were not common until the 19th ». I've never seen a baroque piece using triplets (I don't know many compositions from this epoque, though). On the contrary, tuplets are more frequet in Chopin's works, for instance.
I'm interested in any relevant piece of information. Thank you in advance!
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Mensural music was ambiguous about whether there were two or three notes to one division. So triplets clearly were already part of the music then even though notation did not distinguish them. In Baroque music, the subdivisions were already smaller and triplets typically indicated by beaming (or brackets).
I think the italic 3 is a later convention.
There are a lot of rhythms we would now notate with tuplets in medieval music, although mensural notation works differently (there is, for example, a 9 over 4 polyrhythm in Ph. de Caserta's ballade 'En remirant', from about 1380; ars subtilior music is full of such things). In music before Franco of Cologne's innovations, you can also find things that must be tuplets of various lengths (for example in Notre Dame organum), but which are notated spatially, a bit as in graphic notation, as well as in the music of the late thirteenth century (Petrus de Cruce, etc.) I'd be interested to know the earliest example of using a number over a group to indicate a tuplet; I'm not entirely certain, but the practice was certainly in place by Bach's time. (You can see most, if not all, of these examples in the Norton Anthology, vol. 1)
...I've never seen a baroque piece using triplets...
Bach autograph, Wilhelm Friedman Noteboook...
Handel, Chaconne HWV 484, var. 12...
Corelli, Violin Sonata Op 5, no. 12 La Follia, var. 12...
... not one single time on one particular score, but used several times by many composers...
Three composers (pun intended), the triplet aren't singular moments in the music but clearly indicate a triplet subdivision of the beat through out the piece. I'm not sure why you made this particular requirement. The Chopin example mostly divides the beat into two eighths and the triplets occur only in isolated places about once every 8 bars. Either way, these examples clearly show triplets were used by Baroque composers. I could only find an autograph for Bach, but that shows the triplet numeral and the slur above.
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