Ex. 4.1 - This next example is the piece that I learned this technique with. It’s from Suzuki Violin Book 6, Sonata No. 4 in D Major by George Frederic Handel from the baroque period. Other catalogs seem to call this Sonata No. 7. The opening movement is very slow, and so there are a lot of small rhythms. Adding in dots to the already small rhythms makes it that much harder to read and count correctly, so this is a great candidate for small value beat slashes. I’ve included a recording of this piece below. This is a trio sonata, so there’s a violin, and a “continuo” part which is played in this case by a lute playing chords over a cello bass line. Harpsichord and organ are also common chord instruments in this context. Note that they are tuned in “Baroque” tuning, so A=415hz, not 440 hz, and it sounds about a half step lower than it would in modern tuning. I’ve put the full sheet music for this movement below the video in a clean format, and then we’ll look at how to mark beat slashes for the first part of it. Here’s a link to the PDF file of this sheet music.

Now let’s look at the first big section (the first four lines in this edition), and see how we can make it manageable. Let’s start by noting that the time signature is C (which means “common time”, another way of writing 4/4 usually). However, given the tempo of the piece, we’re going to feel our pulse in eighth notes, not quarter notes, and so we’ll use slashes on every 8th note. When I learned this piece, we marked them in for every eighth note in any measure that had notes for the whole piece, but sometimes you just need to mark a particular section. Below, I’ve added a version of the sheet music with eighth note slashes for every beat in the first four lines. Here it is, and then we’ll talk about it:

So the first thing to notice in this version is just how long the E is on beat 3+4 of m. 1 (and the next 8th note). It’s a full 5 tick counts, and our ticks are not exactly fast even at 8th notes in this piece (they are playing about eighth note = 60 bpm in this recording). When I’m counting this piece, I’m feeling 8th note pulses and subdividing into 32nd notes for my subdivision internally (four subdivisions per pulse). That allows me to properly place the dotted 16th / 32nd note rhythms at the end of m. 2. You’ll also notice that in m. 4, we have a 16th note on the 2nd 16th note of beat 2, then dotted 16th / 32nds on the rest of that measure, so we need to make sure we count that correctly. The first “pick up” (into the 4th eighth note count) is longer than all the others. In m. 5, we have some eighth notes, and those will feel longer than you think they should be. Then on the next line (m. 6 into m. 7), we have a tied quarter and eighth note, and that will be really long, and then the next grouping will feel much faster. Make sure you hold the tied note all the way to the 2nd eighth note - it can be easy to accidentally put that beat too soon. At the end of the phrase, hold the quarter note all the way to the 3rd eighth note count - people often cut final notes of phrases short by accident (it’s “one - and - off”, not “one - off”). You can taper it, but don’t cut it short. Finally, notice how long the nearly two measures of rest leading into the next section feel at this tempo.

All of these rhythms are made easier to grasp because we can clearly see where the 8th note pulses are falling.

Here’s another tip for performers. Depending on what instrument(s) you play and what pieces you are playing, you may find that you have places where you have many measures of rests in a row. This particularly affects low brass and percussion in a symphony orchestra, but as a violist, I also have long rests relatively frequently (I have fewer when I play violin!). How can you count all of those and come in at the right spot?

The most important thing that helps (other than simply keeping accurate count in your head) is learning how the overall piece goes. This is something you should be doing anyway for every piece you play whether or not you have rests - as Jim Domine, the conductor for the San Fernando Valley Symphony Orchestra that I play in, is fond of pointing out, “This is not a reading session, this is a concert! The audience is paying to hear you play the piece, not read it!” Playing the piece means knowing the piece as a whole and knowing how your part fits in at any given point, and not getting too buried in your part. See Life Tips Rehearsals Tip No. 7 - Nos. 5 and 6 are also relevant here!

Getting back to rests, this applies to rests in that you can listen for specific instruments or lines that happen shortly before your entrance - these are called “cues”. Sometimes you will even have them marked into your part in notation in small notes just before your entrance with a label that shows you who is playing those notes. But you can mark them in yourself (just the instrument name should be enough, you probably don’t need to write in notes). When I have several sets of rests broken up, I usually mark in any obvious instruments that start at each breakpoint as well, so I can keep myself oriented throughout the rest passage and not just hope at the end that I got it right. And I would recommend actually writing these things in your part (see Life Tips Rehearsals Tip No. 3 - always have a pencil!). I used to think I had a great memory for things that came up in rehearsal (I still do have a pretty good memory!), but once I started marking things in my part anyway, I was surprised at how much better I felt about my playing. I had a lot less stress because I didn’t have to remember things, I could just see them on the page as a reminder. I felt much more secure with my entrances as well, which meant I could come in with confidence. And the confidence boost itself meant that I liked playing that much more. This goes for everything in a rehearsal, not just cues - that’s why you should always have a pencil!

Another type of cue you can note as you count sometimes is any meter changes that occur in the music - they will break the rests at meter changes and you can be sure that your conductor changes the beat pattern there too and that will help you stay on track.

All of these cues should go along with counting as well - don’t replace the counting with the cues. The cues should serve as extra reassurance (hopefully!) that you haven’t gotten lost in your counting. Sometimes when I have several cues throughout a rest passage, I relax my mental counting somewhat, but I’m still at least subconsciously feeling the counting, and I usually do keep it at a conscious level. This is particularly important if your cue is a single instrument line, because otherwise you are completely dependent on that player not missing their entrance, which is a dangerous position to be in! This is why it pays to know the overall piece and not just one specific instrument to listen for. This is one reason why even performers should know how to read scores and should get the scores for the pieces they play whenever possible. You can learn the piece by just listening, of course, and you should definitely do that too, but I’ve sometimes even found it helpful to have a copy of the score at a rehearsal with me, particularly for sectionals.

Your section can also help you count rests, at least if you are a string player and all your section members are playing the same part. This would apply to wind players in wind ensemble more than wind players in orchestra. Since you’re all counting rests together, make eye contact now and then and mouth numbers to see if you agree (try to do this discreetly - the audience shouldn’t see you do that!). Then you need to get in playing position at least a bar before you start playing (several at a fast tempo), and the principal player should give a physical indication (a “cue”) with their body a beat before you start playing. The conductor might also cue you themselves, but you should be able to enter correctly without them.

Especially early in the rehearsal cycle, I will often count rests physically on my fingers to be sure I know where I am. As I get to know the piece better, I have to do that less and by the concert time I don’t do that much. Again, if you do that during the concert, make sure it’s discreet. You don’t want to do things that draw the audience’s attention when you are not the featured line, which by definition while counting rests you are not!

Now for some examples. These two are both pieces I’ve played in orchestra recently that had long rests, and how I handled them.

The first one is Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2, which we performed recently at the CSUN Symphony Orchestra. In the 3rd movement Scherzo, at the start of the trio the violas have about 84 (short!) bars rest split between two rest groups. The tempo is fast and in 1, so each measure actually feels like a beat, which means it goes by faster than you might think for that many bars.

It turns out that the measures are grouped in 6-bar phrases (6 beat phrases), so for the first 24-bar rest, I count four of those 6-bar phrases, and then the violins enter at the breakpoint, so we noted that in the part (it says 1sts). Now in this section, there are nine 6-bar phrases before our cue is marked. We also noted that the oboe entered with the opening material (of the trio) in the phrase before the clarinet cue we have marked. That isn’t marked in the part, we just remembered that - our principal oboe seat was filled by an outside player this school year, so he wasn’t there until a week before the concert anyway. If I’d heard that all along, I might have marked that in the part. By the way, I’m counting every bar even while I’m feeling phrases - I’m thinking “ONE, two, three, four, five, six, SEVEN, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, THIRTEEN, etc.”. I’m just also aware that I’ve heard one phrase, then the second phrase, and so on.

Here’s my sheet music below for this piece - this is from the actual PDF I used on my iPad in ForScore for our concert. I’ll start the video right at the beginning of the trio (starts with the winds at bar 153). See if you can count this and “enter” correctly at the end of the rests! [Here’s a link to the full score of the symphony if you want to see that]. Note that you’ve come in correctly if you hear the string pizzicatos and flute melody:

This next example comes from the Dvorak Cello Concerto in B Minor, which we played at the Topanga Symphony Orchestra recently. Again, I was playing viola on this one. In the second movement, there is a long rest in the middle, which is broken into several multi-measure rests. There is a long cue for the solo cello line before we enter, so I didn’t really have to do anything else, but since there were quite a few measures before we got to that cue, I marked in some extra cues along the way so it would be easier to tell when that cue started. At rehearsal 6, the bass and horns start playing something new (the basses are right next to me at Topanga - literally feet from me on our tiny performance stage there!). Then the solo cello holds the fermata after that.

This one also gives me a chance to show another way of doing cues. In the 15 bar rest after the fermata, the solo cello plays alone for 5 bars, and then the woodwinds come in at bar 6 of that rest. So I broke the rest myself and showed 5 bars, WW [woodwinds cue] and then 10 bars rest. It’s hard to do that for a very big rest with lots of changes, but that can be a useful trick if the part doesn’t break the rest at a convenient location for you. In this case it was almost necessary because during rehearsal without the soloist, we’d just start where the woodwinds came in, and I needed to know where that was in my part, particularly since the soloist wasn’t there to give the cue marked in our part. This can be an issue in concerto parts - often the solo part is the most useful cue in the overall piece, but we usually have several rehearsals without them, rendering all of those cues useless. When I’m doing parts for a concerto as a copyist, I try to use orchestra parts whenever I can for cues, so that the cue will be there the whole time (at least if people don’t miss rehearsals!).

Again, here’s part of my actual PDF I used in ForScore on the iPad for the concert, and I’ll start the video right on our last played note (the A going to Bb - remember this is alto clef! The blue arrow points at where I’m starting the video, that wasn’t part of the music for the concert). Keep in mind this is the slow movement, so it will seem slow - you might feel the pulse in 8th notes. See if you can follow the cues and “enter” at the right spot.

I learned this idea in the first few weeks of my first semester at Berklee (I think it was in Arranging 1 class). When writing music notation, there are different ways you can write many rhythms, and some will be easier to read than others. You should generally try to avoid obscuring certain beats by writing notes across those beats - you should instead break them into smaller notes and tie them so that players can see where the beats fall more easily. This is the Invisible Barline - you always tie notes across a barline, so if you pretend there is one you can’t see at particular beats within a bar, you can tie notes across that too and it will be much easier for the players to count. Note that this is something that certain notation programs will do automatically - Dorico, which is the one I use today, does this, though you can override it in cases where you intentionally want something else. I’m not sure about the other programs.

Here are some examples. I’ll start with an example I just made up, and show what it should look like, then what it shouldn’t look like. Then we’ll examine what I did differently.

This one is correct.

Now for the wrong way:

Hopefully you agree that the 2nd one is harder to read than the first one - if you saw that you’d probably need to add some beat slashes (see above). So why is that top one easier to read? It’s because of the invisible barline. In 4/4, we should not have a note hold across the third beat. If a note is syncopated and would cross the third beat, we need to break it into smaller note values and tie them across the third beat instead, so that there’s a note that visibly falls on the third beat. How exactly you do that will vary based on the passage in question. Here are some graphics showing the invisible barline as a dashed barline from my example above (m. 1, m. 2, and m. 4 respectively):

We have the same rules in other meters too: in 3/4 we can’t cross beat 3, in 2/4 we can’t cross beat 2, in 6/8 we shouldn’t cross the 4th eighth note, in 9/8 we shouldn’t cross the 4th or 7th eighth notes (assuming we’re in standard 3+3+3 9/8).

Like any good rule in music, there are exceptions for specific rhythms. There are a couple of common syncopations that are easy enough to read even with crossing the invisible barline that we can get away with it. You can still follow this rule in those cases, but you don’t have to. Here’s the main one you can get away with:

This version is also ok:

Here’s another tip for writing notation - this is also something that your notation software will probably do for you, and most of the time it will get it right. 

Generally you should beam notes in groups based on the meter of the time signature, even when you are doing things that cut across that meter (see cross-rhythm in Chapter 6). This just helps players keep track of where they are better, and it’s easier to perceive a cross-rhythm as a cross-rhythm if you can visually see the actual meter. You might think that beaming by accent groups would be more effective, but since a cross-rhythm cuts across the normal accent pattern, I am still usually feeling the standard pattern with my internal counting. It’s actually easy to get lost if you start to feel the cross-rhythm as the main groove in many cases. Even in songs where you never really use the standard pattern, I would still generally beam normally.

You will find music where they do temporarily change the beaming pattern. Here’s an example in Tchiaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite (Danse Arabe) where they rebeam the notes to show the hemiola effect of the woodwind line against the prevailing 3/8 meter. (ONE-two THREE-one TWO-three). The video starts with the long oboe line before the first of the hemiolas, at the beginning of the sheet music below.

In this case, rebeaming the notes does help to show the desired effect. I would still recommend generally sticking to the standard pattern, especially at first while you are learning how to write effectively. Once you have some experience, if you feel that it would be more useful to rebeam a passage after giving it careful consideration, then go ahead and try it. I always say you should learn the rules so that you can break them intelligently and intentionally, but you can certainly break them once you know what you are doing. At least you’ll know why you are doing it.