Last Score Page (Etiquette) question

Dorico
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Hi everyone,
Is it a hard and fast rule that the last page of your piano score has staves from top to bottom like all the previous pages? Put another way: Is it frowned upon if your final page only has one or two staves as opposed to the 4 on the pages before it?

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When making parts for an orchestral scoring session, fill the last page with blank/empty staves all the way to the bottom of the page. This is an often requested old recording studio practice (still used today) from Hollywood for the orchestra players to make their own notes.

Normally it’s completely okay to have only a few lines on the last page on your normal sheet music.

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Thank you for taking the time. I’m a little confused at your comment tho. “… leave the staves on all the way to the bottom of the page.” Does that mean, Yes, fill the last page with music from the top to bottom? Or do you mean it’s O.K. to have “blank staves” so that the musicians can write notes there.

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@hannuala is referring to filling the page with blank staves.

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Somewhere in Dorico’s Layout Options one can make this happen:

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I don’t consider it a rule, but it may be a requirement of publishing houses.

For my own scores, it’s a judgement call as to what pleases my eye best. As a player, I actually prefer the vertical spacing to be similar across all pages. If justification on last page causes that to be massively different, I won’t use justification there.

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Just consider for a moment whether you know of any piece of music where a movement finishes short of the end of a line, or the conclusion of the work itself is other than both at the end of a line and the end of a page; this is not accident but design, the design of the music engraver.

A Note on Music Engraving and Printing , Norman Gray, 1953.

It’s certainly something that traditional engravers would aim for in their casting off, by balancing every page with a similar amount of music.

It’s really easy to achieve this in Dorico by setting the Note Spacing default space value to a different value. The factory default is 4 spaces, and if you’ve run over a bit onto a new page, you can bring it in by reducing to 3.75 or 3.5. Conversely, if you’ve nearly but not quite filled the last page, you can bump it up to 4.25.

You can do this either in Layout Options, or with a Note Spacing Change, if you need different values on different sections/flows.

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Personally, I live by the rule “It ends where it ends”. Occasionally, I “justify” it to fill a page (most certainly a system, but half-filled systems I think are OK as well), but it is difficult for e.g. short preludes that “spill over” to a new page. Yes, you can narrow it down or even use a smaller size, but in a collection of pieces that will look “uneven” and just plain sloppy, IMO. I did it in a few editions as some pieces were infamous for difficult page breaks.

I think there is a passage in D. Knuth’s The TeXBook where he writes (IIRC) “If the paragraph spills over to create a ‘widow’ or ‘orphan’, rewrite the text so it doesn’t…”. Perhaps we should instruct composers/arrangers to do the same…

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Having only one or two systems on the last page of a piano piece is usually the result of earlier failures in the layout, and you will never see this in well-engraved music by a well-known publisher.

In solo piano music, excellent page turns should be controlling your layout. This in itself often prevents your problem from happening. If it doesn’t, you split what is left as evenly as possible between the last two facing pages, laying out the measures and systems more spaciously if necessary to avoid having only two systems on the last page. I would say that three systems on a page is the bare minimum.

If we are talking about 1 or 2 orphaned systems on a final left page, that should be avoided at all costs and corrected by adding them to the previous two pages. and adjusting those before if necessary.

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This works well for large page formats. We are now mainly seeing A4, which requires other solutions. Anything can fit on a full page, given the correct size.

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Thank you