How do you leave a measure open at the end of a staff to show the rest of it is on the next staff?

• Mar 1, 2023 - 04:38
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P. Greenwood:

From a notation viewpoint, I can't help wondering: It seems much easier for performers to parse whole bars, than to keep track of them from one system to the next.

Is breaking up bars like that an actual tradition of some kind in historical notation? Or is it possible they were just economizing—squeezing as much music into systems as they could—because printing back then was so laborious?

(That said, it always rubs me the wrong way when I post a question here—and rather than offering a solution, someone replies to the effect, "But [I think] it makes more sense for you to do it this way..." 😆 So I hope you'll take my question in the purely curious way it's intended.)

In reply to by Andy Fielding

It is better if possible to not break measures onto separate systems for the reason you say: musicians are used to recognising the patterns of whole measures. But sometimes it can't be avoided when the number of notes in a measure is too great to fit within one system and a measure has to be split to run onto one or more measures. The most frequent use would be in cadenzas. They can fill a single measure that goes on for pages and generally have no barlines. Where a non-cadenza long measure has to extend onto another stave some publishers use a dotted barline at the break point, others use no barline. Musescore can do either practice.

In reply to by Andy Fielding

The situation where this is actually very common is hymns and similar vocal music where there is a "pickup" at the beginning of each phrase. Many publishers will split the measure at that point, so the lines of music align with the lines of lyrics, rather than always have the first word of each line of lyric appear at the end of the previous system.

The example actually posted is curious because it sort of looks like such a case, but isn't...

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