Thank you much for s-z rest

[David Raleigh Arnold]

On Wed, 13 May 2015 08:46:58 -0700 (MST)
tisimst <address@hidden> wrote: (...)

Thanks much to you and Phil Holmes for your replies re the s-z
quarter rest. My ineptitude caused my OP to appear in Gmane
but apparently not in the mailing list, so I repeat a little:
AFAIK s-z was introduced shortly before 1808. It is useful for a
rest simultaneous with two other voices when the note heads leave
too little room for a Gutenberg rest between them.

There is a rule concerning the case where the note heads are too
close together to place a rest between them. It is obscure enough
that many publishers have violated it over the past two centuries.
Such a rest must be placed before a stem. If there is more than
one rest, all must be considered to live between the note heads
in the space that they were squeezed out of. It is not OK to tuck
a colliding reat in close to a downward stem under a note head.
If this is done wrong the reader must assume that the rest is in a
voice below the note. I have never seen this rule in any textbook,
which is one of many reasons that I have persistently maintained
that there is no such thing as an authority on music notation,
but I have seen it on line, and I have seen it best observed at
least a dozen times on a single page of score of a duet by F. Sor
from 1808 or so. It is not true that nothing can be done about
rest collision or that colliding rests can't be automatically
placed correctly in all cases with four stems + rests or less.

The best possible placement of fingering is such that it flows to
make it easier to follow. It has never had anything to do with
being on a staff or not. 

You will never ever see an example of fingering directly
(due east) after its notehead. You should not allow it. It has
been the cause of many mistakes, and it has no advantages at all.
Fingering is best before a note head because it may govern how
you play the note, just as a sharp or flat does.

An older way of placing the augmentation dot of a note on a line
is to place them so that they point to the next note. It seems to
me that this is a better way as long as it is only one voice and
no chords on the staff. You will find this interesting rule in a
textbook by Gehrkens on line in Gutenberg. The rule is about flow.

Flow was very important in elevating music engraving to an art. It
would be nice to have more flow in typesetting, wouldn't it?

Gardner Read gave us the forked stem. It is less useful than
what he intended to replace. If there is more than one fork
necessary that becomes ridiculous. I asked long ago for a zero
tuplet bracket, so that any chord whatever could be easily
typeset. I think now that a grouping bracket, similar to that used
for piano score, placed more or less horizontally over anything,
could easily and unambiguously indicate notes to be played
simultaneously which cannot easily be notated otherwise. Such a
chord could be set to look as if it were in sequence, although
squeezed a bit, and then the bracket would place all on the
same beat, leaving it pretty. It has always bothered me that,
until horrid makeshifts were invented, stems were always vertical.
There just isn't any good reason to change that.

BTW typesetting on my site is all lilypond.

Kindest regards and many thanks, Rale

-- 
For All Guitar Beginners: The pages of very easy solos missing
from all of the published guitar methods of others.
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David Raleigh Arnold               http://www.openguitar.com