John Ruggero wrote:Even though centered alignment appears more visually pleasing, I am having trouble finding actual examples of centered half notes over whole notes in the standard literature, either on the same staff or between staves. I have looked at German, French, and American editions in the public domain in various genres without success. Even in early editions of Chopin where the whole notes occur at the beginning of the measure (rather than being centered or off-centered in the older style, which avoids the problem nicely), there is left alignment. I will keep looking, but, at this point, centered alignment seems rare.
Funny... I had no big trouble finding examples of centered noteheads. I went through a semi-random sample of scores in my bookshelf, looking at the alignment of whole notes with other notes, and made some observations:
1. Left-alignment is indeed most common, both in hand-engraved scores and - especially - in computer-engraved scores.
2. However, in a significant amount of hand-engraved scores (nearly as often as group 1 above!), the alignment is inconsistent - sometimes left-aligned, sometimes center-aligned, or something in between. Sometimes even
right-aligned, when there is a stemmed note above and a whole note below it. And I'm not talking about early engravings from past centuries, I'm talking about 20th-century engravings, even from some well-known publishers!
3. In some engravings (both hand-engraved and computer-engraved), even if they may be left-aligned when you look closely, the width difference between whole notes and other notes is so slight that the whole issue is almost moot. (For example, scores engraved with SCORE and its standard set of notehead glyphs.)
4. Finally, some scores (both hand-engraved and computer-engraved) do exhibit consistent center-alignment. However, this is the smallest group of these four. I will post a few examples in a moment.
In short, there's been a wide variety of different approaches...