Rehearsal marks: The I or J quandary and its solution in Finale

Is this something I learned long ago, forgot and then rediscovered? Or am I learning it today for the first time?

Very early on, many years ago, I noticed that orchestral scores would usually skip either the letter I or the letter J. This makes sense, since in most fonts those two letters look almost the same. If the conductor asks the orchestra to resume playing from letter I but one or more musicians start from letter J, or vice-versa, that defeats the whole point of rehearsal letters.

I use Finale, the music notation program now owned and developed by Make Music, Inc. Since at least Finale 2010, the program comes with automatically sequenced rehearsal letters. It's a great convenience.

For instance, if a conductor tells me that my composition or arrangement has the rehearsal letters spaced too far apart, I can just pull up the score and just tell Finale where I want to add rehearsal letters, and the program takes care of changing all subsequent rehearsal letters accordingly, e.g., if I put in a new rehearsal letter between C and D, Finale changes the former D to E, the former E to F, etc.

But what about skipping I or J? In the past, what I have almost always done is try to place one or both of them at the start or the end of a fully scored passage, then hiding one of them (the keyboard shortcut on the Windows version is Ctrl-Shift-Alt-H). The rehearsal letter will still show on your computer screen, though faintly, but it will not print in the score nor the parts.

The reason to seek a fully scored passage for this kludge is that rehearsal letters, hidden or not, break multi-measure rests. It might look strange on a player's part to have a 3-measure rest starting at letter H, followed by a 5-measure rest ending at letter J, even though it would make much more sense to just have an 8-measure rest.

Occasionally, I would still do this even if the timpani were left out of an otherwise fully scored passage, figuring that timpanists are so used to counting consecutive multi-measure rests that an oddly split rest would not bother them in the least.

A better option is to put I or J at the beginning or end of a repeated section, but this of course supposes the particular piece of music has repeated sections and one of those repeated sections has an ending or beginning at about the middle.

Since the repeat sign is a better visual indicator of location than a rehearsal letter, and since it breaks multi-measure rests regardless, a rehearsal letter is useless, except as a hidden letter.

Sometimes, though, neither of these options are available, such as if the piece has no repeats and is thinly scored in the middle. Then you can't really have a hidden rehearsal letter, because a lot of player's parts are going to have oddly split multi-measure rests. Every rehearsal letter has to be musically meaningful and necessary.

Which brings me to what I've just learned today, or perhaps learned, forgot and rediscovered today: you can simply reset the sequence. With the Expression tool selected, click on the letter I that you want to change to J, or the J that you want to change to K.

Then right-click (or Control-click on Mac) on it to bring up a contextual menu, from which you select Edit Rehearsal Mark Sequence... to bring up this dialog box:

The default is Continue sequence, so just change it to Restart sequence at: and type in J or K or whichever letter (or double letter) you want to continue at. It's that simple.

I don't blog about composing and arranging as much as I would like. It takes up time that I would rather be spending on composing and arranging. But with this particular topic, given that it's something I could forget and have to relearn in the future, I figured I had to take the time to write something about it and publish it on my blog.

iTunes play count problem

It's not the biggest problem I'm facing, by far, even if we limit the scope to problems relating to music, but it's pretty damn annoying: iTunes 12.7 on my computer has suddenly stopped updating play counts and last played dates.

I was listening to Bruckner's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, complete with finale reconstruction by William Carragan, when I decided to convert some other tracks to AAC to send to someone. Normally, I pause playback before asking iTunes to convert anything. This time I didn't.

Maybe that's what messed up the play count logging feature, I'm not sure. iTunes logged that I listened to the first two tracks of the album last night, but not the last two tracks, even though I listened to each of them all the way through to the end and had iTunes repeat the last couple of minutes of each of those tracks.

All the tracks played alright, but the last two tracks that I definitely listened to last night were supposedly last played back in February. I tried playing some shorter tracks (three to four minutes each), beginning to end, over and over again, but iTunes also refused to update either their play counts or their last played dates.

I have quite a few Smart Playlists which depend on play counts or last played dates. It's a feature I find very useful. For example, a couple of my Smart Playlists are for tracks with zero play count, so that tells me which new (or newly imported) tracks I haven't listened to yet.

Like most people, I have a few favorite tracks (or "songs") that I listen to on a fairly regular basis. Those are on the Top 25 Most Played list, a playlist which I believe iTunes comes with by default.

But I also like to be reminded of a track I haven't listened to in months, so I made playlists for that. Then I listen to those tracks and some of them become new favorites of mine, others I might decide to delete. Most of them, though, I listen to once, they come off the playlist, and then a few months later they get on the playlist again.

I'm still running Windows 8. I've never liked Windows Media Player all that much. iTunes  has always made sense to me. So after I bought my current computer and hooked it up to the Internet a few years ago, one of the first things I did was download and install the current version of iTunes for Windows.

However, I've been annoyed at how frequently the program asks to update itself. Though it's not nearly as annoying as with Adobe Flash Player, which seems to want to update itself every damn week, it seems.

Don't ask me at what point I upgraded to iTunes 12.4, I don't remember. Aside from a few minor occasional annoyances with the Play Next feature, I was pretty happy with it. So when iTunes kept bugging me about versions 12.5 and 12.6, I declined.

Then, the notification for version 12.7 came to me at a convenient time last week, so I decided, what the hell, might as well upgrade. The interface was noticeably different, but for the way that I use iTunes, it was the same old program that I have enjoyed for all these years now.

All my playlists that depend on play counts or last played dates were working normally. Then, on September 19, 2017, at night, suddenly play counts and last played dates stopped updating.

Apparently this is a problem lots of other people have had at various times throughout the history of iTunes. This is the first time I'm experiencing it. Some have reported that turning off crossfading fixes it. I don't have crossfading on, but I thought I would try turning it on and then turning it back off. It made no difference.

I'm willing to try just about anything, provided it's not too drastic. Downgrading to an earlier version of iTunes? Maybe. Deleting and re-importing my entire iTunes library? Hell no.

Those of you who've also had this problem with iTunes 12.7, please let me know what you've tried and if it has worked for you.