Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Long line next to notes?

Hi! First time poster, sorry if this is the wrong place.

I've just started playing again after five years off (trying to remember all of my highschool piano lessons). I'm finding it come back to me quite easily, but had one question:

I know that the arpeggio line next to a chord means that you play the notes separately, but what does it mean when there is a straight line?

The notes in these situations are too far apart for me to play together, but I'm not sure what it means?

Thanks very much,

I think we might have to see it.

Without that, my main guess would be that it's telling you to play all those notes with the same hand, even though some of what you say might seem to argue against that. And if so, it would mean that you do roll the chord, just as if the line were 'wavy.'

Ah, I see: I might try and scan the page later, so I can further explain it!

It's kind of like a square bracket, but I was just so confused because from memory (I'm not at home at present) there is considerably more than an octave between the notes, and it just seemed implausible.

Editing to add: Hmm, I feel kind of stupid now. When I googled 'square bracket arpeggio', I'm told that it is indeed another kind of rolled chord... I don't know why I couldn't think of the phrase "square bracket" to begin with...

Well there you go!

Chopin was the first to introduce that long line to indicate that the (mostly) 2 notes were so wide apart, that one could play them as an arpeggio, I think many others followed his example, except F. Busoni, who, on the contrary, had the strange habit to ask the player NOT to arpeggio some 15th-span chords, preferably in both hands, presto...

Gardner Read's Music Notation: A Manual of Modern Practice (2nd ed.) discusses the vertical bracket enclosing a chord only in the context of harp notation where it indicates a harp chord played non-arpeggiato. It is not shown as an example of arpeggiation in standard notation, although he documents several other types of notational variations to the usual wavy line.

I'd llike to see this scanned example along with some information on the score edition. I'm an amateur student of notational practices and would like to add this to my collection of curious cases.