History of Measure Numbers ( Rehearsal Letters)

Can anyone provide information about the development of numbering measures (or alternately rehearsal letters) for chamber works?

The only example that readily comes to my mind is Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, which has rehearsal letters. I am at a loss to figure out how musicians in the day reckoned without them.

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I could not find a facsimile of the original edition in order to check this and look. Do you know where that can be found?

I believe I read that commonly very few rehearsals were done in general in those days. Maybe they’d have one run through before the performance and the rest depended on the high skill of the musicians. So perhaps rehearsal marks did not matter much!

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons letters can certainly be used as rehearsal letters, but they aren’t there for that purpose. They are there to show how specific lines of the sonnets (which most people think Vivaldi wrote himself) and what they describe line up with specific musical events.

I will be interested to read what people add to this topic!

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I feel fairly certain that composers rarely if ever numbered bars. I think bar numbering is something added by publishers and engravers. As to when the practice arose, I do not know. It’s an interesting sort of question.

It touches slightly on my previous posts about bar counts and so on in Bach and in BWV 988. If Bach was deeply concerned about bar numbers then he hid it - because there are no bar numbers in his MSS.

| andro Andrew Bernard
March 9 |

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I feel fairly certain that composers rarely if ever numbered bars. I think bar numbering is something added by publishers and engravers. As to when the practice arose, I do not know. It’s an interesting sort of question.

It touches slightly on my previous posts about bar counts and so on in Bach and in BWV 988. If Bach was deeply concerned about bar numbers then he hid it - because there are no bar numbers in his MSS.

Barry Cooper’s article ‘Rehearsal Letters, Rhythmic Modes and Structural Issues in Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge’, which is freely available (published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 July 2016) is very helpful regarding the introduction of rehearsal letters in published parts and scores.
Beethoven is implicated; “[His] Grosse Fuge, published in 1827 after being detached from his string quartet Op. 130, appears to be the first work ever to have been allocated rehearsal letters. These were added by Beethoven’s friend Karl Holz at the request of the composer and his publisher Mathias Artaria. […] The concept of rehearsal letters seems to have been entirely new at that time. Although the fifteenth-century use of the signum congruentiae in vocal parts is somewhat similar, no such device was in use in the early nineteenth century, and bar numbers were not used for this purpose till nearly a century later. Rehearsal letters can be found in orchestral scores by Mendelssohn and Spohr from the early 1830s, but none are known from the 1820s in scores by these or other composers.”

Regarding numbers of bars in J S Bach, I suggest starting with the published work of Ruth Tatlow; see her Uppsala University website, Wikipedia entry, etc.

Yes, I am very familiar with that. What I was trying to say was that Bach did not write bar numbers in his MSS, despite being interested in bar counts and proportion.

A web search on a topic such as “group size dynamics” will offer many thoughts about how the members’ sense of individuality, responsibility and purpose change as the group grows larger. Baroque ensembles may have intuitively known the music, and one another in a way not common in modern orchestras. Recent videos of historically based orchestras show a kind of involvement very different from that in larger orchestras. https://www. <- YouTube>

A facsimile of an early 18th century edition for the Four Seasons can be found on IMSLP (look under “parts”). They have “rehearsal letters”, although as Dongsok rightly points out, that was not their intended use.