On Oct 23, 2006, at 5:10 PM, Robert Patterson wrote:
One of the overriding concerns of music notation thru the ages, and esp. engraving, seems to have been the elimination of the need to AssUMe anything. It is, of course, a never-ending quest, but in this case the convention is quite sensible. The glyph for an empty measure never appears in any situation other than an empty measure. Which is practical for the whole rest until you get to 8/4 or larger meters.
Even more sensible would be to leave empty measures empty--as in fact has been done in most music of the last fifty years and more. Another sensible approach (also recent, but rarer) would be to fill empty measures with exactly the rests required to fill them (as: a half rest and a quarter rest in a 3/4 bar).
All of which is just my roundabout way of pointing out that this entire thread has been about historical practices and older music. It would seem to me that in all such cases, one ought to either a) treat empty measures exactly as they are treated in the source(s), or b) to follow the known conventions of the time and place in and for which the music was originally created, or c) follow the best *modern* usage and leave the measures empty. Which of these one chooses is a matter of one's editorial philosophy and/or mandate.
Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press http://home.netcom.com/~kallisti/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
