Indicating omitted bars

Dorico
1

When bars are cut in musical theatre scores, the original bar numbering is retained, so you often have non-consecutive numbering – for instance, bar 16 might be followed directly by bar 21. In cases like this, some scores will include an indication like “(to 21)” at the end of bar 16 for confirmation that those bars have been deliberately omitted and there isn’t a mistake in the numbering.

I’ve been doing this with system-attached text, but if I add this to the end of bar 16 (to follow the example above), it will break a multi-bar rest, which is not ideal. If I add it to the start of bar 21, that avoids the multi-bar rest issue, but then I need to move the text in Engrave Mode to appear above the end of bar 16 in every part – which would be okay if there were only one or two instances in a score, but across multiple flows and multiple parts, this adds up to a lot of time.

Can anyone suggest a better way of achieving this?

Thanks!

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2

I have never had the opportunity to see an instrumental part where this skipping was done, only in piano/vocal scores; but I would think your instrumentalists would want the multi-measures to break so they would know where in the multi-measure rest to start counting if the conductor says, “pick up from measure 22.”

3

Thanks, Derrek. Here’s a real-world example from a reed book. The “To 213” indication doesn’t break the multi-bar rest, and there’s really no need for it to. I agree that you would break the multi-bar rest if the bar numbering changed somewhere in the middle of it, but that’s not the issue here.

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4

I’m afraid I don’t think there’s a better way to achieve this at the moment, but it seems like there should be one! I’ve made a note.

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