On 23 Oct 2006 at 13:14, dhbailey wrote: > I've never understood the need for a different whole-rest for empty > measures in meters larger than 4/4. We have no problem using them in > meters smaller than 4/4, so why not just keep the traditional > whole-rest for all meters? It's painfully obvious that that's the > only thing in the measure, so anybody who can't keep their place > through a single measure of 3/1 meter with a single whole rest in it > shouldn't be playing the music. And any rests longer than 1 measure > would be part of a multiple measure rest anyway, so it isn't as if > someone's going to have to look at a string of whole-rests in 3/1 > time.
My guess is that it's a holdover from the days when multimeasure rests actually represented the number of rests involved. That meant in 4/4 two measures of rest would be represented by a double whole rest (i.e., a block filling an entire space rather than just half of it), four by two-lines filled in, etc. Since we've abandoned that for the modern multimeasure rest symbol with a number over it, I don't see why the standard couldn't be just to use a whole rest. In old music, with its longer beat values, I might be tempted to go with a double whole rest for the default for everything, but that only works well if you're not halving the duple sections. There's a definite problem with 2/2 in that context, but not if it's 4/2. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
