At 8:25 AM -0500 5/14/07, Randolph Peters wrote:
You didn't ask this, but for what it is worth, when doing academic writing about music, some institutions insist on referring to bars as measures. (Bars are the lines, not the contents, although I think that is debatable.)
In my experience, in the U.S. at least, bar and measure are synonymous and interchangeable in both academic and common usage. Perhaps the difference is a particularly British (or in your case Canadian) thing. The vertical lines are bar lines, the spaces between them are either bars or measures. Two cultures separated by the same language, and all that!
Furthermore, the abbreviation for one measure is m., as in m. 22. Two or more measures get the mm. treatment (i.e. mm. 22, 23 or mm. 22-23).
Picky, but quite correct. Now, if I could just get people to recognize the differences between data and datum, criteria and criterion, media and medium!
I thought that if you were concerned about the right kind of dashes, you might also want to consider this other bit of fussiness. Fortunately for me, this list happily accepts anything a person wants to call it.
Indeed. I used to know which was which, but there are actually 3 different horizontal connectors: the hyphen, the n-dash, and the m-dash. The m-dash--represented in typescript by two hyphens (or n-dashes??) as shown here--is used to separate interjections that might equally be indicated by parentheses or (god help us!) by footnotes, so they are really separators rather than connectors. I'm not sure my keyboard can produce all three (Mac), but the shortest one is typed as a lower-case hyphen and the m-dash as Shift-Option-hyphen. (I don't know WindowSpeak.)
Raimund's 2nd example, by the way, shows on my screen not as a dash but as a raise-to-the-power carat, which I believe would be read as "22 to the 23rd power," an AWFULLY large number of measures!
John -- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
