Alignment of (double) whole notes

[John Ruggero]

There is also an issue between staves with centered alignment. If one staff has a half note centered over a whole note at the beginning of a measure, but the other staves have halves only, do all the halves align? Perhaps it was problem that caused music engravers to decide on left alignment for all notes possible. Perhaps this is related (or the same as) DatOrganistTho's point above.

[erelievonen]

I think at this point it is important to consider a parallel problem in word typesetting.

Perhaps you do not see center aligned notes of this kind because of the same reasons you don't see books typeset in center justification: it's just hard to read over and over.

Center justification being nice for titles, etc, but not for details and body text.

I think this is an entirely faulty analogy.
A line of text in typesetting corresponds to a system in music engraving.
A letter character in typesetting corresponds to a note(head) in music engraving.
Thus, the vertical alignment of noteheads cannot be compared to center justification of text.

Here are some better analogies for the vertical alignment of noteheads. All of them favor center-alignment over left-alignment:
1. It may be rare to see text printed vertically (letter by letter), but it happens sometimes, for example on book spines. In such cases, the letters would most usually be centered.
2. Mathematical notations: for example in fractions, the numbers above and below the horizontal line are centered.
3. Diacritical marks are most often centered over/under the main character (ä, å, á, â).
4. In Eastern writing systems where characters are written in vertical columns, they are normally written centered within that column.

Right now I cannot think of truly analogous situations where left-alignment would be the norm, other than music engraving.

[erelievonen]

Even though centered alignment appears more visually pleasing, I am having trouble finding actual examples of centered half notes over whole notes in the standard literature, either on the same staff or between staves. I have looked at German, French, and American editions in the public domain in various genres without success. Even in early editions of Chopin where the whole notes occur at the beginning of the measure (rather than being centered or off-centered in the older style, which avoids the problem nicely), there is left alignment. I will keep looking, but, at this point, centered alignment seems rare.

Funny... I had no big trouble finding examples of centered noteheads. I went through a semi-random sample of scores in my bookshelf, looking at the alignment of whole notes with other notes, and made some observations:

1. Left-alignment is indeed most common, both in hand-engraved scores and - especially - in computer-engraved scores.
2. However, in a significant amount of hand-engraved scores (nearly as often as group 1 above!), the alignment is inconsistent - sometimes left-aligned, sometimes center-aligned, or something in between. Sometimes even right-aligned, when there is a stemmed note above and a whole note below it. And I'm not talking about early engravings from past centuries, I'm talking about 20th-century engravings, even from some well-known publishers!
3. In some engravings (both hand-engraved and computer-engraved), even if they may be left-aligned when you look closely, the width difference between whole notes and other notes is so slight that the whole issue is almost moot. (For example, scores engraved with SCORE and its standard set of notehead glyphs.)
4. Finally, some scores (both hand-engraved and computer-engraved) do exhibit consistent center-alignment. However, this is the smallest group of these four. I will post a few examples in a moment.

In short, there's been a wide variety of different approaches...

[erelievonen]

Here are a few examples I found of editions where whole notes are consistently center-aligned.

Eustache du Caurroy, Fantasies, Editions musicales de la Schola Cantorum, Paris, 1960s:

2016-6-12 23.23.51.png (66.76 KiB) Viewed 8727 times

Anton Bruckner, Orgelwerke, Doblinger, Vienna, 1970:

2016-6-12 23.23.16.png (93.19 KiB) Viewed 8727 times

Pièces d'orgue de Louis Couperin, Éditions de l'Oiseau-Lyre, 2003:

2016-6-12 23.23.35.png (61.98 KiB) Viewed 8727 times

It may or may not be significant that none of these editions are by the world's leading music publishers, but nevertheless, I consider all of them beautifully engraved.
Let me add that I've never paid any attention to this question before, and I've never had any problems reading editions with all those different whole note alignments. Which might lead me to conclude that it's just a question of house style, and centering and left-aligning are both valid approaches.

[OCTO]

Oh, that was SOMETHING! I like statistics.

(still changing my mind. ..)

[John Ruggero]

erelievonen wrote:

Funny... I had no big trouble finding examples of centered note heads.

As I said, I looked through scores in the public domain (pre-1923) at IMSLP, not more recent ones. I did find inconsistent alignment in many older scores which appeared to be the result of the hand engraving process. (There were also some older scores in which the whole note and half note noteheads were the same and thus perfectly aligned, like the situation that erelievonen mentioned.) Despite the inconsistency, the intention in these scores seemed to be left alignment, which was not always perfectly achieved. I found no scores with consistent centered alignment, but gave up looking after some time and moved on. Apparently there are a few, as one would suspect.

For what it is worth, I don't care for the engraving in the first two of erelievonen's examples, because I see inconsistent spacing and alignment. For example, the half notes on beat one of the first measure in the Caurroy are not centered under the whole and double whole notes, in fact, they appear to be right aligned, and the downbeat notes of measures 19 and 20 in the Bruckner are badly aligned to each other and in relation to the bar line with the accidentals in the pedal too close to the bar lines etc.

Centered alignment of whole with double whole notes seems best to me. But I am not convinced about other note values with whole notes. Some might feel that it gives a ragged appearance, particularly at the beginning of measures.

[MJCube]

I continue to prefer the appearance of center alignment, both on principle and for visual beauty. This thread is making me reconsider issues of legibility, but it hasn’t convinced me. Especially erelievonen’s counterexample, above, please my eye.

Also, we can’t assume that half noteheads and black noteheads are always the exact same width. Sometimes they differ.