This bar consists of a whole note in the treble clef and a whole rest in the bass. Why aren’t they aligned?
I would expect something more like this:
Yes, this is what we see in traditional engravings (when all parts have a full-bar note or rest). Currently no software does this automatically. The best we can do in Dorico is manual note spacing. This has been requested before; see this thread from last year for some discussion.
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Yes, that’s note centering, as per a large amount of traditional engraving practice. Dorico can’t do it, surprisingly, and it certainly wont do it automatically. I and many others have requested this option. I am sure it will come one day. somewhere over the rainbow.
I wonder when was the last time that whole notes were written in the middle. At least before the mid-1800s?
In German editions from 1820+ they are all written at the start of the bar.
Perhaps some publisher- or national- specific tradition?
I see nothing wrong with your first example, at all. That’s exactly how I would write it by hand. The note comes at the beginning of the measure. That is, at the beginning of the time space it will fill.
The rest is not a whole rest. It is a measure rest, which is used to fill measures of any length, even 2/4 or 3/4. It goes in the middle because it applies to the whole measure
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@MicheleGalvagno come at this from the other end. I engrave for a New Complexity School composer and all his whole notes - and many rests are centred in the bar, and he wants that. It’s not restricted to Baroque.
Hmm. From what I can find, single, final notes are at least indented much more than normal; or the final bar is reduced so that the normal spacing before the note matches the spacing after the note.
This seems to hold true from the “Alte” Bach Gesellschaft to the Neue Bach Gesellschaft.
My Baerenreiter Bach B minor Mass (1954) has the whole notes and whole bar rests aligned at the end of the Crucifixus, and the breve at the very end of the dona nobis is very definitely centred.
Henle also tend to centre final whole notes in their new editions.
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Wow … that’s very interesting!
Not sure I like that, to be honest, but I’m glad to see that the option is widely used, much more than I would have originally thought.
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You’ve clearly been looking at too many computer engraved scores! 
There’s a fine line between the argument that something objectively “looks better” a certain way, and that something looks better just because it’s what we are used to seeing.
That’s why I’m somewhat passionate about following traditional rules, because then it preserves “what we are used to seeing”; and because there’s usually a good reason behind it.
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Way too many haha!
Actually that’s curious: I spend an enormous amount of time looking at past manuscripts and old editions (granted, mostly from 1780 onwards).
I wonder if my training, which started in the early 2000s already on the computers, may have affected my perception of scores, as if I didn’t see certain details unless really paying attention to them.
Back then, I was copying from modern editions, which may have already been realised on a computer, spoiling the root of my perception. Time to heal that!
If we’re being honest, I think we’d have to admit that in the case of this particular visual affectation, “good reason” might be a stretch.
After all, a musical score is primarily a…
…set of instructions for communicating to performers what sounds to make and when to make them. Placing initial notes in the left end of the measure, after the visual landmark of the barline, helps with temporal (including, when applicable, metrical) orientation. (It’s not a proportional linear system like piano roll/key editors, etc., but it is a reasonably clear linear system, with the non-proportionality counterbalanced by great gains in visual efficiency.)
I fully suspect that the practice of centering whole-bar durations and rests is a simple case of the human brain placing the visual above the aural, since that’s how we’re “wired,” and therefore preferring the look of centered things. It’s fine if we want to “give in” to that and enjoy a round of Eine Kleine Augenmusik for all (“Prost!”). But we should recognize and admit it for what it is: a small-scale betrayal of what the printed score truly serves, namely reflecting (through a distorting mirror) time in visual space.
In the case of aligning full-bar durations and rests, it’s interesting (read: quirky) that centered placement of non-sounds (rests) took priority over sounds (notes) in the emergence of “the rules.” The best argument I can make for aligning them is that not aligning them is visually jarring.
Fair enough. @wwzeitler’s desired outcome looks “cleaner” somehow (again, our penchant for visual symmetry underlies it, no doubt):
Especially at moments of grand pause or finality I agree this looks somehow “good.”
But of course, the rule could just as easily have been: “In measures containing only full-bar notes and rests, bar rests should not be centered, but aligned with the full-bar notes at the beginning of the measure.”
To my eye, the (roughly) centered whole notes in this edition of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 26 (Schenker ed.; N.B. — Schenker places measure numbers at the ends of measures) look perfectly reasonable because of the visual compression of the bars. It’s all about space-saving. (I note also that the flats in bars 77 and especially 82 and 85 are well left of center, with the whole notes being at least pretty close to it.)
Bar 69, first ending, gets a bit odd-looking to me, though, with everything centered rather than either of the LH notes aligning with the RH:
But, okay…centered is “nice.”
Here, though, I just find it jarring and unhelpful to performance:
Having the (whole-whole-quarter) imitated motive oozing around between left-aligned and centered is, I think, not good.
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my simplistic $.02 …
Having a whole note (assume 4/4) centered in a measure allows a clear (to me at least) representation of the “breadth” of the whole note (the whole darn bar), while simultaneously allowing the engraver to squeeze the measure in the spirit of saving space.
In the examples above, if the whole notes were left-aligned, I think compacting the measure would then fail to represent the visual breadth of the whole note, thus making reading the music slightly more difficult.
My point of view is that there is a much broader ongoing conflict between:
- score as schematic representation of rhythm (traditional), vs.
- score as strictly proportional timeline (since 20th century – not earlier!)
And what Dorico and other software have settled on is a hybrid of the two, with rhythmic values spaced on a graduated (ideally logarithmic) scale, and completely ignoring the centering issue. Mixed in here is a huge tradition of 20th-century hand-copying that lays out the bars on the page first and then fills them in, which leans toward linear spacing. This is how Finale originally worked by default, and still does if you turn off the automatic note-wise spacing.
Given that barlines must have a little extra space, that disturbs a precise timeline already. The concept of spacing I see in old manuscripts, which was faithfully copied in traditional engravings, is completely different: The symbols in a bar are always more or less centered between the barlines, whether it’s 8 eighths, 2 halves, mixed note values, or whatever. To me this consistently reads more clearly than linear spacing. I am bothered as much by half and quarter notes hugging the left barline and leaving unnecessary gaps on the right as I am by whole notes doing so. Once a bar is filled with eighths, this concern tends to disappear.
Also this is much more often an issue with single-staff music. In scores obviously long notes often have to accommodate the space of shorter notes. But in handwritten and plate-engraved orchestral parts you never see large extra spaces for long notes. They generally wanted to fit as many bars on a page as possible to reduce printing costs and page turns.
If anyone is interested in another long discussion about spacing (containing several points I don’t want to restate here), there’s a good one from last year.
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I can’t quite get these two statements to jibe, @derAbgang. It sounds like you’re simultaneously advocating for visual compression of the bar in such cases (as in the first Beethoven example I posted (mm. 70–87)) and against doing it in @wwzeitler’s OP example, @benwiggy’s Bach example, and the third Beethoven example.
Am I misreading you?
I’m less concerned about ‘both in the middle’ than why the whole note isn’t vertically aligned with the whole rest, one way or the other. It looks strange to me that the note is left justified and the rest is centered, even though they are both ‘whole-X’.
I think this is purely a matter of taste. Baroque taste, and modernist taste. There is no argument, and, one and only one option will not do. De gustibus non est disputandum.
Please give us the option and we can apply whatever style suits the individual engraver or work.
Right. Maybe case by case.
@wwzeitler That’s because according to Dorico’s principles notes fall at the exact rhythmic point in time where they begin, so the whole note has to go at the start of the bar, but a whole bar rest is not a note and it is a different class of object and indicates an empty bar spanning the whole bar, so it is centered, and that is standard practice for such rests. You can see the Dorico rationale (but I still want to be able to centre the note).
Me too.
For reference, see another discussion from yesterday about whole vs. bar rests.
Thanks for the Beethoven “Les Adieux” samples! This is an excellent example of, IMO, going a little too far with the principle of “only the horizontal space required by the glyphs themselves”. What specifically bothers me in mm. 183ff is that the LH whole notes in mm. 184 & 188 are actually to the right of center.
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