Andrew Stiller: > > Even more sensible would be to leave empty measures empty--as in fact > has been done in most music of the last fifty years and more.
By this do you mean cutaway scores? If so, they not only leave the measure empty but also remove the staff-lines as well. I would dispute the adjective "most". Cutaway staves and empty empty bars have certainly been adopted in many scores, but if you consider all styles I doubt it is most. Nor do I perceive any consensus that it is "best practice". Scores provide more options than extracted parts. Leaving empty measures empty in an extracted part is a very bad idea, because an empty bar is ambiguous as to whether it was a mistake or intentional. Even for recent compositions with cutaway scores, the extracted parts usually deploy whole rests in single empty measures. BTW: Finale makes empty empty measures really easy. What is difficult is common practice notation (for 4/2 and larger meters). The origin of this thread is about how to reproduce this common practice in Finale, rather than what the convention should be or might become. I for one think Finale ought to be able to reproduce a score by Brahms as easily as one by Stockhausen. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
