Fermata over rest
I know there have been some postings about fermata, but I couldn't find this exact issue.
Alfred's Essential Dictionary of Music Notation says, "If a longer pause is desired, a fermata may be placed above the caesura." But Musescore doesn't seem to let me do this. Am I just doing it wrong, or is this really not a feature? Shouldn't it be?
Comments
How are you trying to do it? I just clicked a rest, double clicked the fermata in the Articulations palette, and it worked just fine (version 1.0). I also tried adding both a caesura and a fermata over the rest, and was able to do so, and to drag the fermata to directly over the caesura.
In reply to How are you trying to do it? by Marc Sabatella
What I wanted is to put the fermata not over a rest, but directly over the //. Your last statement gives the clue: if you put the fermata over a nearby rest or note, you can then drag it to over the //. So I can do it now, thanks, but is seems like an undocumented kludge. I still think you ought to be able to just put in a // and then highlight it and double click on the fermata in the palette, and the fermata should then appear above the //, which is apparently is what you can't do now.
In reply to What I wanted is to put the by jcorelis
I wouldn't call it a "kludge" at all. It's actually a quite straightforward operation once you realize you are attaching two markings to the same note/rest. It's no different from, for example, attaching both a staccato mark and a down bow mark to a note. And in that case, I think everyone would expect the process for adding the second marking to be the same as for the first: you start by clicking the note, not the other marking.
The only thing that's unusual here is that the caesura happens to be a marking that isn't placed directly above the note/rest., so it wasn't obvious to you that it was in fact being attached to that rest. Although since you presumably created the caesura in the first place by first selecting the rest, or by dragging it directly on top of the rest, it shouldn't really come as a big surprise that it is in fact attached to the rest.
Anyhow, I'm guessing it would be perfectly possible for MuseScore to be changed in the way you suggest, and perhaps that will happen some day. But the current method really isn't particularly kludgy. It's a simple matter of applying two markings to the same note or rest. It just happens to be one of the extremely rare special cases that requires a subsequent drag operation to line up the way you might want.