question about a pick-up in choral writing

[RobertGlotzbach]

Hello everyone, first timer here in this forum.

I'm writing a choral piece with verses that are quite different to one another.
If you look at the nonsense example, you can see that I wrote the pick-up in bar 4 while belonging to verse 2.
In the second example, I've put that note in the next system, to me, this makes more sense.
I had a look in "Behind Bars" but could not find anything connected to this.
Do you think this would be a good way of doing it?

Many thanks, Robert

[tisimst]

In my experience, there are usually only two scenarios where I would split a choral bar like you want to do:

1. At the very beginning (a pickup measure)
2. In a hymnal (to show consistent phrasing from system to system)

Outside of that, I do not recommend splitting it up. Leave the measures intact like the first section. Musicians are used to this and should be able to follow it easily. If I saw a score with the split, I could certainly follow it as well, but it looks strange and out of place to me.