Skip to main content ↑ ↓
Topic: blank spaces for unmeasured piano music (Read 4670 times) previous topic - next topic

blank spaces for unmeasured piano music

I was trying to transcribe (for a student who just broke his little finger on his right hand) Mompou's 6th prelude (which is for left hand alone). The music is without barlines and travels [as most one-handed pieces do] from one staff to the other.
The original music is printed without rests in the quiet staff, which makes sense as there is only one 'performer' the left hand. However I couldn't find/figure out a way to get the placements correct without those rests and even then it didn't really look right. Nothing I could find in FAQ or other forums spoke directly to this. I would prefer for it to look as it does from the printer, what about Satie or even my own work- we use the same techniques and pedagogically it is useful- thanks

Re: blank spaces for unmeasured piano music

Reply #1 –
The printed score only wraps at bar lines. If there are no bar lines you will only get one truncated line. So you should use bar lines.

You can't hide rests, so all I can suggest is to put the rests in, select and edit them (Ctrl-E) and set the Vertical Offset so they appear below the staff. Then white them out by hand.

Re: blank spaces for unmeasured piano music

Reply #2 –
Blair (and whoever eric is) why is this true? What is the process that made it so difficult to have unmeasured music. In the *real* world it is very common and I am running into this problem even with large measures that have alot of information (eventually the staff size is just too small to be readable) cutting a measure in half (for example) is a poor solution in the middle of a piece and implies that there is some sort of a downbeat accent where in fact there is none, and writing in text to say ignore bar lines just doesn't work- we are trained too well to do that.

Re: blank spaces for unmeasured piano music

Reply #3 –
I can only suggest that you take a small trip to the NWC homepage and submit a wish to the wishlist. One of the most wonderful things about NoteWorthy is that it's a continually evolving product, unlike many programs where "what you got is all you'll get". Eric (the author of the program) is very receptive to user suggestions, and if you take a look at the "wishes granted" list you'll realize that a lot of the features we now take for granted were implented in answer to requests just like yours.

Re: blank spaces for unmeasured piano music

Reply #4 –
Jane,
I have to say as Fred says: add this to the wish list, it may be realized (as it has benn for some of my wishes).

But if you really do not want to have bar lines, you can hide them by making them print further than your printer can, i.e. out of margins : try to reduce right margin until the bars get out (you may need to really print, though the print preview is useful.). For example, I just tried with a 0.6 cm on right margin on an HP Laser 5, and the bars are not printed.

HTH,
         Dominique.Portier@free.fr

Re: blank spaces for unmeasured piano music

Reply #5 –
...that you can decide where NWC does a line break that way.
But you lose the ability to change on the last minute, which paper/staff size you use (which is a *great* functionality imho)

Re: blank spaces for unmeasured piano music

Reply #6 –
Another thought to follow up on marsu's suggestion:

Leave out the bar lines as you desire, and do a print preview. Take notice of which note is the last to appear on the staff, or perhaps at a reasonable "breath mark" point, and put a bar line there. This will cap off the staff, without any other bar lines. (Surely no-one would interpret the line at the end of the system as a new downbeat??) Repeat the print preview / insert barline process until the end of the free-form section.

Re: blank spaces for unmeasured piano music

Reply #7 –
Just a question about the original subject: you wrote
>The music is without barlines and travels [as most one-handed pieces do]
>from one staff to the other.
>The original music is printed without rests in the quiet staff, which makes sense
>as there is only one 'performer' the left hand.

I'm not used to piano, not enough to understand why a pianist would still need two staves instead of one if playing only one hand. There are two staves not because there are two hands, but because you may need to play notes so far apart that two staves are needee to notate them easily, avoiding ledger lines. And including differing clefs.
So why not to use one single staff, and changing clef where necessary ? This is not harder to read, since there is already clefs changes in usual 2-staves scores; moreover, you won't lose place for an empty score...

Am I wrong somewhere ? Or do I overestimate pianists brains capabilities, which I doubt (managing 10 fingers plus two feet ain't easy!) ?

Just a thought...

Re: blank spaces for unmeasured piano music

Reply #8 –
I think Marsu's conclusion in Reply 7 is correct but his argument is the wrong way round.

There are two staves because there are two hands and each has its own staff. If the composer puts the left hand part on the upper stave for convenience or to make a musical point (e.g these notes, although played with the left hand are part of the theme being played by the right hand), it is usually marked "LH" and similarly a right hand part written on the lower stave is usually marked "RH".

Taking Jane's case, a single handed part would logically be written on a single stave. But why should logicality have anything to do with it? As Jane says, the convention seems to be that one-handed pieces are written on two staves. Perhaps the look of a single stave would be too off-putting for a pianist. And if you need two staves for the correct look, why not spread the notes between them?
 

Re: blank spaces for unmeasured piano music

Reply #9 –
A piano has two staves because the instrument has such a large range, not because there are two hands. It's fairly common for both hands to have notes on the same staff, and pianists are accustomed to reading hand actions that cross staves. It's much easier to read a broken chord or run that flows continually up, than one that is broken in the middle by a clef change (and concomitant mental shift.)