Tips for Marking Measure Numbers

I rescued my horn from a basement closet back in 2014 and started playing again. That fall, I started playing in an orchestra for the first time in about 30 years. For much of that first season, I felt like I was always getting lost. Embarrassed, I would whisper, “Where are we?” to my section mates.

I rarely get lost now. To a large degree, this is just a result of repeated experience through many, many orchestra rehearsals since then. I do think, however, there are some specific techniques I worked out along the way to help keep track. I don’t think basic rehearsal coping techniques get explicitly taught, but maybe they should.  To that end, I want to pass along some specific tips for marking measure numbers in your part.

Here is a typical example of one reason that inexperienced orchestral brass players can lose track. A few months ago, I was sitting in the first rehearsal for our next orchestra concert, and we were working on Beethoven Symphony No. 2, 2nd movement. This was on my stand:

This music shows the measure number at the beginning of each line. You can see that the second line starts with measure 31 and the third line starts with measure 52.

After stopping play for a moment, the conductor said “OK, starting from the pickup to 19.” Then he immediately raised his baton and started conducting. Only a couple of seconds elapsed between announcing the starting location and the conductor’s downbeat. The orchestra strings started playing again well before I could count the measures up from 1, or down from 31, to find measure 19. I then had to try to figure out my next entrance from the musical context.

By the way, here is measure 19. How many seconds would it take you to figure this out?

It is extra difficult to quickly determine the correct starting location when it occurs in the middle of a multi-measure rest. It’s easy to make a math mistake that my software developer friends would call an “off-by-one error.”

Here is what I do now. When I see that the conductor is going to use measure numbers extensively to rehearse a particular work, then I will mark several measure numbers on each line of that work. First, I will mark measure numbers that are multiples of 5, such as 20, 25, 30, and so on.  (I mark the measure numbers very lightly to avoid visual clutter.) That way, every measure is only two or three measures away from a measure number, so I can find any measure number very quickly.

Second, I mark the first measure of a multi-measure rest, and then I mark the first measure after the multi-measure rest. 

Here’s what that looks like.

This really helps me when the conductors starts the orchestra in the middle of one of my part's multi-measure rests. If the starting location is measure 19, for example, I can immediately find that it is in the middle of the multi-measure rest starting on measure 17. But I don't have to do any mental arithmetic to figure out exactly where. When the orchestra starts playing, I just start counting at 19, knowing that I will start playing when my count gets to 25.

I hope this helps some players who are starting to learn about orchestral playing. If you have other basic coping tips that might be useful to inexperienced players, I’d love to hear about them. You can send me an email by clicking on “Contact” at the bottom of the page.