Cross staff slurs with double curve

• Apr 29, 2020 - 16:17
Reported version
3.x-dev
Type
Functional
Frequency
Once
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Reproducibility
Always
Status
active
Regression
No
Workaround
No
Project

While MuseScore supports slurs that cross between staves, it does not allow the slur's curve to change direction midway.

slur-double-curve.png

Viktor Kosenko - 11 Etudes in the Form of Old Dances, Op.19 - No 6. Bourrée in A major, mm. 6-7. Publisher: Kiev: Musytschna Ukraina, n.d. Plate 69

Notice how the upper end points up and the lower end points down, and there is a point of inflection in the middle. This is in contrast with the ordinary slur (above) where both ends point in the same direction.

These double-curved slurs are discussed on p. 321 of Behind Bars, where Gould suggests they may be appropriate when stems for notes on each staff point in opposite directions. However, the screenshot shows they may be appropriate in other situations too.


Comments

Like this you mean?

Curly Slur.png

It just needs the second group of quavers to be moved to the lower staff, create the slur and then play with the handles on the slur. You can get really weird shapes if you want :-)

@SteveBlower, you're right! So that's what the extra drag handles on the diagonals are for!

slur-drag-handle.png

However, the slur is still logically connected to the wrong end of the stem, so we can use this issue to track that instead.

To some extent you can get that control by flipping the slur with "X", but that changes both endpoints. If you only want one changed, you're out of luck. We probably need new properties to handle that.

It's similar to the case of a cross-stave beam that changes direction part way.

cross-stave-beam.png

Interestingly, that particular case seems to be handled automatically now but it didn't used to be (it used to be that the notes were either all upstem or all downstem and you had to move the beam manually).

However, now the beam direction in the inspector is meaningless for this case (Up, Down and Auto all look like the screenshot). Perhaps we need an "Inner" direction that is only available on a grand staff. The "Inner" direction could be used for slurs and other elements that go between the staves.

hairpins-between-staves.png

For hairpins and dynamics, "Inner" could mean they apply to the part, while "Above" and "Below" mean they appy to only the top or bottom staff.