Category 1. Duration and Alignment
Some of the problems of automated music typography seem very mundane. That is certainly the case with measure length. We have not yet found a measure that is too wide for an ordinary sheet of paper, but when long streams of measures must be placed on a series of pages, awkward line breaks and page breaks are much harder to avoid when the average measure length is relatively long.
In Ex. #7, from Brahms' Clarinet Quintet, the rotation of small note diminutions from part to part, especially in Bar 1, and the tremolandi in all five bars shown contribute considerably to the general problem of layout.
Related problems are discussed under "Slurs."
Ex. #7. Brahms: Clarinet Quintet. This illustration was produced by J. Stephen Dydo using the Note Processor. It appeared in Computing in Musicology 7 (1991), 125.
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