Number of measures per line

Question

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

1. if the measure was very note dense (so more space per note makes better readability)
2. aligning with other voices which have denser notes
3. if the measure was thematically different in some way (flats/sharps ect)
4. 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.

Answer 1

Brief answer, this is user error.

The basic rule is simply 'let it flow'. Notation programs generally make a pretty good job of this, spacing things out so as to maintain a readable and attractive note density.

'Let it flow' sometimes needs manual modification. Sometimes (but not, perhaps, quite as often as many writers imagine) fixed 4-bar lines are appropriate. It's nice to have a section-ending double bar or repeat barline come at the end of a system. And in instrumental parts (it's rarely possible in a piano score) we try to arrange convenient page turns by - when there ARE a few bars rest - placing them just before a page break.

None of this applies here. It's just bad engraving. And it's not MuseScore's fault. Although free, it's a perfectly competent program. But, because it's free, it attracts more inexperienced users than Finale or Sibelius. I don't think MuseScore would have offered this layout as default. But even if it did, the user should have improved it! Here's a standard edition of 'Bumblebee'. Nothing controversial about the layout. It's just obviously how it SHOULD be laid out!

And here's a quick test done in MuseScore. With no manual intervention, it does what it ought to. But even if it hadn't - it's been suggested that a few more accidentals could force a line break - that's not really the point. MuseScore was given conflicting instructions. 4 bars per line, but too many symbols to fit into one line. The user should have reconciled this before publishing.

Answer 2

The musical term for what you are calling a line/row is a system.

The number of measures/bars per system doesn't necessarily* have any musical meaning. Often as many measures as possible per system is used — to save on paper and page turns. But readability is important too, and the music notation shouldn't get too squashed.

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In the example piece above, what I think has happened is as follows:

• The person who made that score had a MuseScore setting that automatically makes system breaks every 4 measures.

• But, because that piece is full of semiquavers/sixteenths and accidentals (which take up lots of horizontal space) MuseScore decided that after 3 measures the system was full, and there needed to be a system break (to stop the the notation from getting too squashed).

• Both of theses rules don't work well together (for this combination of music piece, staff size, and paper size) and results in systems alternating between 3 and 1 measures. This doesn't have any musical significance to this piece of music, and just looks terrible.

It can easily be fixed: by turning off the automatic system breaks, by making system breaks every two measures, by making the staff size smaller, or by making the paper size larger. All of theses fixes are relatively easy to do in MuseScore; it's not a bug with the program, the user probably just didn't know how to do any of these (or didn't care how it looked).

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* Personally, I do try to use system breaks (and page breaks) at significant points in the music when possible: at the end of phrases, sections, etc. places that make the structure of the music easy to see. For lots of music this will be a break every 4 measures, but this is only because this is how the music is often structured. If a section of the music is structured in 3 measure phrases, I would try to have system breaks every 3 or 6 measures.

Answer 3

There is one notable perceptional effect: if the staves (lines) are too similar, the human reader might encounter problems to identify in which line to continue. (Laurence's example demonstrates this quite well, which to a certain degree would be remedied by adding the different dynamics)

I remember a statement from the lilypond motivation basics, that in those cases the number of bars is a useful controlling parameter to achieve a slight variation. In your example the second line is of course completely exaggerating this idea.