Ah, I guessed wrong about what the confusing bit was.
Yeah, though not being a pianist, to me this says, "It's one connected phrase that starts on one hand and ends on the other," and the left hand is usually in the lower staff and the right hand in the upper, as hellsop said (and the 'l.H' / 'r.H.' markings are (AFAICT) Just In Case somebody doesn't find the meaning of the cross-staff run/flags clear -- a good precaution).
I recently had to look up how to write something like that in ABC notation (er, using one of the abcm2ps extensions).
There's apparently a whole buttload of piano-specific notation conventions beyond the ones I've already bumped into. (Then again, I guess a pianist would say similar things about some of the guitar notation I take for granted.) Where you're asking, "what does this mean," about half the time I'm asking, "what's the [xx instrument] idiom for writing this?" -- when I'm not asking questions like yours.
Of course, there was also the time I had to ask another musician what a quarter rest symbol meant, but that was because the copyist -- this was rented music for musical theatre -- used an unfamiliar form and had Really Crappy Handwriting. I think typeset part books are more common now, but oh, some of the handwriting I've seen in sheet music, oy!
Yeah, though not being a pianist, to me this says, "It's one connected phrase that starts on one hand and ends on the other," and the left hand is usually in the lower staff and the right hand in the upper, as hellsop said (and the 'l.H' / 'r.H.' markings are (AFAICT) Just In Case somebody doesn't find the meaning of the cross-staff run/flags clear -- a good precaution).
I recently had to look up how to write something like that in ABC notation (er, using one of the abcm2ps extensions).
There's apparently a whole buttload of piano-specific notation conventions beyond the ones I've already bumped into. (Then again, I guess a pianist would say similar things about some of the guitar notation I take for granted.) Where you're asking, "what does this mean," about half the time I'm asking, "what's the [xx instrument] idiom for writing this?" -- when I'm not asking questions like yours.
Of course, there was also the time I had to ask another musician what a quarter rest symbol meant, but that was because the copyist -- this was rented music for musical theatre -- used an unfamiliar form and had Really Crappy Handwriting. I think typeset part books are more common now, but oh, some of the handwriting I've seen in sheet music, oy!
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