Aggregate Time Signatures: Position, Appearance and Dashed Barline

Dorico
1

I’m copying Ligeti’s 6th piano etude and while Dorico handles most of it beautifully, I ran into a several problems with Ligeti’s (somewhat unusual) time signature:

  1. Ligeti places his time signature in the two spaces between the three staves of the piano. I’v messed around with different notation options, but could not find an options that achieves that. Is that possible?

  2. Although the time signature is 4/4, Ligeti consistently places a dashed barline in the middle of the bar. I know I can use an aggregate to get the dashed barline, but is there a way to change the time signature to appear as 4/4 and not 2/4+2/4?

  3. The dashed barline does not connect all the piano staves. Is that an option (I know it was not two years ago, but am wondering if there has been a change)?

I know I can manually put in the dashed lines, but this creates a host of other issues. It resets the accidentals, for one. The other problem is that some of the voices ignore the dashed barline and have durations that cross it.

Any ideas?

2
  1. This one came up a few days ago, or at least similar. The easiest way, I think, would be to set the first bar to 4/4 and add a manual dashed barline. Then set the second bar to 2/4 + 2/4 and hide that time signature.
3

Ugh, that’s so obvious I can’t believe I missed it… I just used the similar trick in another piece. Thanks!

4

#2. To get the automatic dashed line, separate the two 2/4 time signatures with a pipe symbol “|” rather than a plus sign.

5

Thanks, Derrek. That part I got, it’s the appearance issue (solved by Dan) and the fact that the barline doesn’t extend through the system that is the problem.

6

What about Nr. 1 of your questions - did you get an answer or find a solution? I too want to place the time sigs in between the staves, but not on top.

7

One way might be to hide the time signature on those staves (may need to use a ALT+ENTER time signature to hide it on just the keyboard staves) and use MusGlyphs to enter the time signature between the staves as text.