Re: Bar numbers seem to be one off

[Simon Albrecht]

On 26.09.2015 12:36, Wols Lists wrote:
> On 26/09/15 08:31, Andrew Bernard wrote:
> > However, you don’t often see scores with every barline numbered, and generally 
> > publishers only print the bar number at the start of each line, and normally 
> > leaving out 1.
> Actually, printing bar numbers at the start of each line is NOT general
> practice.

‘General practice’ doesn’t mean that every single score has it.

>   Yes I think it's great, and leave it there when I'm redoing
> parts, but I've almost never seen it in any music I've been given to play.

Which seems to be a particularity of that domain in which you happen to 
make music. True, it didn’t become common until some time in the 20th 
century – leaving us to wonder how on earth ensemble rehearsals were 
done before, if often there were no rehearsal marks either. And nowadays 
some publishers/editors flood their scores with bar numbers for every 
second or even every single measure, which I find aesthetically somewhat 
off-putting and practically lazy: a little mind training is always good.

Yours, Simon