I believe in the value of the D.S. It can save space in a score, making it easier to print; it can make it easier to learn a piece, because you don’t have to notice that a section is identical – it’s the actual same measures. It is also a beast for beginning musicians to master – really seeing the roadmap of the music takes time. And it can lead to confusing and frustrating reading situations. (Who among us hasn’t come upon a D.S. and realized that the segno is buried, 4-5 pages back, and now those pages aren’t necessarily in order. Danger!)
That’s why I can’t understand why piano/vocal scores, in particular, are such frequent culprits for D.S./To Coda roadmaps. The reasons why they shouldn’t are many:
- They don’t save much space. The repetition of musical material is more irksome when there are many staves, like a choral open score or orchestral score; when you can fit 12-16 bars to a page, a D.S. becomes less necessary.
- They make it harder to sight read. Piano vocal scores are being sight read all the time by accompanists, voice teachers, gigging pianists with insufficient practice time.
- They don’t save much ink. Actually, as more scores are being used digitally, with no paper whatsoever, they don’t save any ink at all. Who cares if it’s a 10-page PDF or a 12-page PDF?!
- They make the music worse. As a notation junkie, I have absolute conviction that notationally clarity makes the music better. Any time we make it more difficult to read the music, we lower the eventual quality of performance.
Today, I came upon a score with two D.S. markings, to the same segno. Later, there were 2 separate Codas, labeled Coda 1 and Coda 2. The “To Coda” markings were just 1 bar apart in the score, making it exceedingly confusing. This is just an extreme example of the way we are mistreating musicians with musical markings intended to add efficiency.
Why are we still doing this?
