NOTATIO

I'm working on engraving a piano duet and encounter some difficult page turns that cannot be avoided (resulting to overly wide spacing or uneven greyness of the page).

I'm thinking of using eyeglasses to indicate those difficult page turns (or as a 'licence' telling that I couldn't find a better page turn than this), but couldn't find any source or essay that match this usage.

Do you think it's a good idea to do it?

The standard indication is "V.S." (volta subito)

Eyeglasses mean something else (pay attention)

What RMK says, except that all the V. S. says is "watch out, you must now do the impossible" and works in an orchestral part where two players are playing from one part and one can stop playing for a moment. It could work in a piano duet as a warning if one player must turn in the middle of a measure, but the single eighth rest you show in your example would be too short to qualify

It is a very unfortunate thing not to have good page turns in a piano solo or duet. And it is even less forgivable in a duet since there is twice the possibility of finding a good turn with two people available. And piano duets are generally performed from the score, ouch! "Overly wide spacing", or "uneven grayness of the page" would be the last thing I would be considering in the case of a piano duet. In the old days publishers were concerned about the number of pages for economic reasons and resorted to bad page turns. That is no longer a consideration and good turns should be found no matter what.

If this piece is available at IMSLP I would be glad to look it over to see about turns. It is rare when turns cannot be found in a piano solo or duet. Even in piano chamber music.

When I was a chorister, we used to draw a pair of glasses into the copies as an instruction to 'watch' the conductor or otherwise pay more attention than usual. (As it happens, the Finn brothers were also in the same choir at the same time, and that's why they added a glasses glyph to the Sibelius font set.)

However, I seem to remember that the glasses were drawn pointing left to right, rather than right to left, which is why Sebastian has them flipped, compared to every other font! Left to right also faces 'the direction of travel'.

. Difficult page turns would be marked either V.S., or K.V.S., as a contraction of K.V. (a schoolboy rendering of the Latin 'cave') and V.S.

benwiggy wrote: ↑12 Apr 2025, 09:52 we used to draw a pair of glasses into the copies as an instruction to 'watch' the conductor or otherwise pay more attention than usual.

Yep, eyeglasses typically mean to watch the conductor, not a page turn.

Or watch another member(s) of a chamber group at a crucial point.

Or a reminder to look up because that’s when the hot dancers are on stage.

Or a reminder to buy a pair of glasses. And that's why they should be much bigger than in the first examole.

I remember our former principal trumpet put a sticker on the front of his folder with a pair of glasses with a slash through them.

In other words: Don't look at the conductor.

And then there are the two pairs of invisible eyeglasses in the score of Beethoven's Duo for Viola and Cello.