I’ve written about tempo markings and “repeat and fade.” My third and final pet peeve with piano-vocal sheet music is crazy road maps.
With the motivation of saving 1 or 2 pages of printing costs (a moot point for a growing segment of digital-only music readers), so many piano-vocal scores have multiple repeats, D.S. and D.C. markings, Codas, etc. One chart we read tonight had a 1st and 2nd ending inside the second ending of another repeat.
When you understand it, it’s not hard to follow, but it takes extra thinking, and for the pianist, extra page turns backwards. (In another chart, the D.S. led to the last measure on a page. Grr.)
These crazy road maps can decrease the size of the piece in pages, but increase the work needed to read it quickly. And in the end, that’s our goal with so much of the music. In addition, younger musicians tend to have trouble following the more complex road maps, leading to misread or mislearned music.