I'm relatively new to reading piano score and I notice lots of little subtle things about it which have great importance. One feature I wonder if it is ever used with special importance is number of bars per line/row. The published books of game music I have seem pretty consistent within a song, tho it may differ across the whole book. normally 3-5 bars/measures in a single row.
Sometimes when reading a score found online it would go from consistently 4 bars but then suddenly one line has only a single bar/measure... in some cases this makes sense to me
- if the measure was very note dense (so more space per note makes better readability)
- aligning with other voices which have denser notes
- if the measure was thematically different in some way (flats/sharps ect)
- really long volume bars (crescendo arrows) indicating a large increase over a single measure (tho you could also use p/m/f to indicate the degree of absolute volume change)
Are there any other (valid) reasons to do something like this? Does it bother anyone else? I'd prefer it was at least consistent in a song to make it easier for timing tracking to be consistent as I read. To me it's so disruptive that it is this something I may bug report over? Am I just over reacting here? I just don't know something important I assume, and maybe there are good reasons to do this.
I notice this in a lot of pieces, and one in particular is: https://musescore.com/nicolas/scores/437 This score alternates between 3 measures per line and 1 measure per line This goes on thru the whole song. I don't see any clear reason why it does that. Seems odd to a noob like me... Maybe it's just poor generation? some computer produced effect? ie something like a line justify, so if it's going to take 2 pages anyway, it just averages the measures out across the page... idk... doesn't seem like a great theory... so I downloaded the song and view it in musescore app, and the effect is (almost) gone, So I guess it's just something in the musescore web app viewer... However there is still a few measures where it displays like that even in the windows app... and the way it split the song across pages is really odd... but now i'm probably getting off topic.
I think this question was trying to ask something similar but it was worded really poorly: How many measures/bars per staff?
Ok, so maybe my example could be explained for a variety of reasons... But I think it's still a valid question. Maybe to someone with more insight this could be obvious.
TLDR; Is there any functional musical reason (or other valid reason) why you would change the number of measures per line?
PS by use of "line" I mean a single row on a sheet. I'm a noob so IDK what musical line means.