dhbailey wrote:
That's the part which baffles me -- when I see a single rest in an otherwise empty measure I assume it's the full measure since there's nothing else to play.
One of the overriding concerns of music notation thru the ages, and esp. engraving, seems to have been the elimination of the need to AssUMe anything. It is, of course, a never-ending quest, but in this case the convention is quite sensible. The glyph for an empty measure never appears in any situation other than an empty measure. Which is practical for the whole rest until you get to 8/4 or larger meters.
If there's a rest for a half-measure, there's stuff in the other half-measure to play.
Unless there is a mistake in the part, in which case one is left confused. If I'm playing a part in 2/4 (in an orchestra) and see nothing but a quarter rest, I know there is a mistake. This has happened many times in real life in my career to me or to colleagues.
If you use a whole rest symbol both for a half-bar and whole-bar rest, then an empty bar in an extracted part looks like it could be a mistake. This is neither a hypothetical nor a fringe issue. The problem would exist in as commonly performed a piece as the Brahms Requiem if the end of the 3rd movement did not use double-whole rests for empty bars. In fact the end of the 3rd movement has 3/2 and 4/2 measures next to one another. The 3/2 empty bars have whole rests while the 4/2 empty measures have double-whole rests.
-- Robert Patterson http://RobertGPatterson.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
