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(Note that these do not seem to be the same as the isolated lines discussed in What does an isolated horizontal dash mean in figured bass notation)

I am trying to work with a figured bass score that has frequent horizontal dashes in the figured bass line that are completely isolated from any figures. Updated exampleExample showing the lines in question

How should these be interpreted? Is there a more common way of showing the same thing?

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    My first thought was that it's a worksheet intending you to fill in the answer. Can you tell more about this score or name the piece? Can you provide the upper voices, so we can see what chord it really is? Voting to close as "lacking details or clarity" until edited.
    – Andy Bonner
    Commented Sep 6 at 12:38
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    Agreed, don't make us guess, show the full staff, and explain more about the source/purpose of the score. What is the publication date? If you play the dashes literally as holding the harmony it sounds like a modern style with lots of "sus", "add", or "slash" chords.
    – Michael Curtis
    Commented Sep 6 at 16:30
  • I've updated the example to include the upper voices. Definitely not modern style - Carlos Seixas - but it's been through some uncertain transcriptions before it's got to me.
    – digitig
    Commented Sep 6 at 21:01
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    Well it's certainly not about "sustaining the previous chord." The chords with A in the bass are simple A minor. In other words, removing the dashes would have no effect on the reading. Which leads me to think they have nothing to do with figured bass at all? They don't make much sense as wayward tenuto marks either. I'm inclined to ignore them.
    – Andy Bonner
    Commented Sep 6 at 21:07

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As with a dash following a figure, it means that the preceding harmony does not change. Since the preceding harmony is unfigured, it is implicitly 5 over 3, a root-position triad, in this case E minor. That means that this should be, in lead sheet notation, Em/A, which is a bit weird.

It is weird enough that I would suspect it of being an error. Normally you'd expect to see 6 (or 6 over 5) there; another possibility is of course to have it unfigured as a iv chord.

It's possible that the editor assumed that the dash meant that the e.g. the A should bear the same figure as the preceding note -- in this case none, which makes more sense harmonically but does not reflect how dashes were actually used in the period. It's also possible that the A should be a G, in which case the dash indicates the same harmony as a 6 would, and the 6 is in my experience the more common way to figure that.

From the second measure, I would infer that the editor might think that the dash indicates 5 over 3, but then again there's no such mark on the first note of the example.

What is the piece? What is the edition? What sources are available for the piece? What figures do they show? The more I think about it, the more I think that the editor has misread the source somehow.

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    Reverse-engineering the editor's thought process, it might be "use a dash on all root-position chords in lieu of a figure, except for repeated notes." Which would also be odd. Perhaps a more Ockham-friendly possibility is that the typesetter has inexpertly rendered long dashes, perhaps long dashed lines, from the original, e.g. the second measure is meant to simply sustain the Am throughout three beats. If these were a dashed line in the original and printed in moveable type, it's easy to imagine an uninformed eye trying to assign each separate dash to a specific note.
    – Andy Bonner
    Commented Sep 6 at 12:44
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    There were similar problems with slur markings in the Capriccio Stravagante that I did my dissertation on; a passage strewn with equal-sized and equally-spaced slur marks that I believe just meant "use slurs, ad libitum," but was sometimes rendered with careful scrutiny, aligning the slurs to the nearest dot, with un-idiomatic results.
    – Andy Bonner
    Commented Sep 6 at 12:46
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    @AndyBonner it might, but then you need something else to explain the lack of a dash on the initial E. (I assume you mistyped and meant "Em" for the first three beats of the second measure.) Misunderstanding movable type is a very likely hypothesis, though in my experience (early 17C, mostly Monteverdi) movable type is very sparsely figured -- and often full of errors of its own.)
    – phoog
    Commented Sep 6 at 13:16
  • It's from the "Et Resurrexit" from Seixas' Mass in G. It's gone through quite a few transcriptions from a proper published edition, so errors are quite possible. I suppose I'll have to try a bit more ear training then listening to a performance!
    – digitig
    Commented Sep 6 at 18:31
  • @digitig thanks. Who published the proper published edition? Is the manuscript available anywhere?
    – phoog
    Commented Sep 7 at 23:04

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