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.