I received this email on the topic of the ideal vertical spacing between staves in scores and staff visibility from my friend and colleague John Hinchey, and thought I would share our exchange. John is a sought-after arranger and trombonist in Nashville who is currently on tour with Martina McBride, and also authors the Notes on Notes blog.
Hey Robert,
Here is a score formatting question. If I have an orchestra score with staves hidden when instruments are not playing, does one set the staves to justify across the entire page or leave them towards the top with extra blank space at the bottom?
Hi John,
Good question. The ideal layout contains a similar number of staves on each page, regardless of whether the score has one or more systems. An even spread of staves (e.g. “justified”) allows the conductor to read the score more easily, as the instruments are always located vertically where expected.
When a page has fewer staves on it than the previous or subsequent pages, space the staves further apart, keeping the top and bottom staves in the same location. This approach works well when hiding an extra string divisi staff or two that is only used occasionally when the tutti group breaks from unison, for instance. But generally, the idea is to keep a similar number of staves where possible.
Elaine Gould, in her book “Behind Bars” (page 522) writes:
“It is better to fill out short systems with some blank staves (tacet parts), so as to balance the number of staves on a facing page, rather than suddenly to shorten the page depth. Likewise, the distance between systems should not be to large: a page looks unbalanced with too much blank space in the middle.
The tacet staves to include are those of a performer who has just finished, who is about to re-enter or who is tacet for only a few systems. However, do not include a copious numbers of blank staves as these are distracting, as are staves that enter and disappear at random.”
That said, in some published full scores, it’s customary to omit from a system staves consisting entirely of rests. This type of format is sometimes referred to as “French scoring”. This type of layout results in a much more compact score. For studied, familiar works, this format is ideal for the conductor, because it requires fewer page turns.
As a page contains fewer and fewer staves, though, the progressively wider vertical spacing makes the score harder to read. So when the staves become too widely spaced, the first option (if there is enough room), is to place more than one system on that page (ideally so the total number of staves is consistent with the surrounding pages).
However, if that isn’t possible; the traditional approach is to preserve normal spacing between the staves, with the top margin consistent with the others, and leave more blank space at the bottom (referred to above as “shortening the page depth”).
If the above looks too much like the end of a movement to you, and there isn’t enough room to lay out another system on that page, you can center the page with the shorter depth. If you have two pages with fewer staves on facing pages, you can lower the top staves on these pages slightly so that the music looks more balanced on the page.
Best wishes,
Robert