Measure being stretched to fit the whole page
I've been working on Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern BWV 1 among other scores and in that score, I've noticed that some measures are getting stretched out to fit the whole page, whereas most pages have 2 measures. Measures that are getting stretched here are measures 27 and 52 and I'm sure there will be more that get stretched as I get further along in the piece. But why are these 2 measures getting stretched out to page width while the other measures are 2 to a page? It can't be the note density in the measure, right, cause that's too similar in the places where I get a very stretched measure to make a difference I think, And I don't think a lyric melisma would cause it either, cause I have a bunch of melismas in the measures that are not as stretched.
But if it's not the note density or the lyric melismas, what is it that's causing the stretch and is there a way to make this more even?
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern BWV 1.mscz | 86.61 KB |
Comments
I have had the same problem with Musescore 3. I found the way to fix it. Let's say I have 50 measures in my score. I add 50 empty measures at the beginning of the score and copy the 50 measures of the written score at the beginning of the score. Then I delete the last 50 measures. It usually works.
There is a tipping point where the number of notes in a measure cause the program to decide whether ther are 4 or 6 or 2 or just 1 measure per line. 27 may look identical to 28 but there is a sharp on the F in E. Hn 2 that takes up a tiny bit more space - enough to tip MS into placing the next measure on the next line.
Once you cave completed your score you can go back over it and shrink some measures just enough to get rid of single measures on a line. You can only so this up to a certain point, though - if a measure contains too many notes and other items then it won't shrink easily.
I have a similar problem, and I don't see why; I read the M4 manual pages; I can't see any breaks (tried removing them anyway) & these measures don't look that complex. I've tried copy/pasting, playing with page styles, so far no luck.
Any ideas?
In reply to I have a similar problem,… by tejjy
There you go. Any better? Selected all notes and reduced the leading space in Properties.
In reply to There you go. Any better? by underquark
Well, the concept of a negative leading space is a useful one to know, thank you. Curious that half of the measures in my score that look like this need this hack, and half don't. But the solution is all I need, cheers