Changing the appearance of whole rests in measures 8/4 or longer
I'm currently writing a piece that uses several 9/4 measures, but a stylistic choice in Musescore in measures 8/4 or longer make the rests in those measures a double whole rest (a square in the 3rd space of the staff). It makes the score, in my opinion, look inconsistent and I would like to change the way those bars look. Is there any way to force ultra long measures to use a whole rest instead of a double whole rest?
Comments
No automatic way that I can think of, but you could press "Z" to open the Symbols palette and add the appropriate rest from whatever font you are currently use. Select the existing rest, press "V" to make it invisible, then click the rest in the palette. You can drag it from the Symbols palette to a palette of your own if you like, for easier reuse.
Yeah I just came across that and not only is the default a bizarre choice (I haven't seen a rest like that in a score from anything after about 1650!), but why there's no option to switch to regular whole measure rests for all measure lengths seems a serious gap.
Happy to take on but it would presumably require changes to the styles dialog and we'd probably want to ensure scores saved in older versions were still displayed the same way.
Have reported here: https://musescore.org/en/node/323707
In reply to Yeah I just came across that… by Dylan Nicholson1
Cross-linking #323707: Request for setting to control display of measures rests in 4/2 and longer meters (breve versus whole)
(Type [#323707] to get that type of autolinking)
FWIW Sibelius denotes whole measure rests in 8/4 the same way as MuseScore. I'm not sure what is inconsistent about convention.
In reply to FWIW Sibelius denotes whole… by bobjp
Presumably that decision stemmed from the same source - while I don't have access to Behind Bars, certainly Gardner Read and other references are clear that modern practice is to use centered whole rests regardless of measure length (even if the Wikipedia article incorrectly cited it as stating that breve rests are still used for 4/2. No reference I know of suggests it was ever suitable for 8/4).
In reply to Presumably that decision… by Dylan Nicholson1
Got access to Gould, and that does seem to be the source here:
The semibreve rest acts as a whole-bar rest in any time signature (but see
below). For all time signatures of 4/2 or 8/4 and over, the breve rest represents
a whole—bar rest:
But from what I can see this is an outlying opinion.
In reply to Got access to Gould, and… by Dylan Nicholson1
I think the real issue here is, there is barely any music at all in 8.4, and a ton of in in 4/2 - most indeed published before 1650, but so what? The Comparing actual quantify of published pages, I would bet the number of pages with breve rests for 4/2 or 8/4 probably outweighs the number of published pages with whole rests by a factor of perhaps 100. Unless there is some genre I'm not thinking of where 8/4 is common?
In reply to I think the real issue here… by Marc Sabatella
I dunno, Carmina Burana uses quite a lot of time signatures with more than 8 1/4 notes in a measure, and is written for a huge ensemble (typically requiring 200-300 performers, often many more), and has surely been printed many many many more times the sum total of all renaissance music in 4/2!
In reply to I dunno, Carmina Burana uses… by Dylan Nicholson1
I'm not counting multiple copies of the same score. So, that's one :-)