I know it’s been posted about before, but aleatoric notation in Dorico. I just want it to be made native. I recently had the unfortunate experience of having to update a score of mine that is getting recorded soon from Finale into Dorico. I was able to import the xml with minor issues throughout but it was largely managable. Except for my opening/ending which makes use of aleatoric notation like this. This, even with the work arounds, is damn near impossible to get correct. I got the boxes pretty easy, but the lines really wants there to be barlines to work properly and even then sometimes the beginning of the continuation line would bunch up into the box. So the work around is great if you have metered music, terrible for unmetered. Frankly I had a lot of issues making the bar underneath the duration work because no matter what it wanted to only go so far as the sax notes. I worked around it by simply noting “til m.5” and “til m. 4” in the piano and sax parts respectively but it doesn’t feel right to me. It’s astonishing that in every way Dorico is unarguably a better product than Finale ever was to me, but in this one area Finale had Dorico trumped. So Steinburg, if you’re listening, some sort of native support for Aleatoric notation would be massively appreciated.
Congratulations on your forthcoming recording! While I don’t compose aleatoric music, I had written, several decades ago, passages that were repeated ad libitum (or ad nauseam, depending on one’s opinion of my music). The works below date from 1978 and 1982, so hardly recent. These were a bit challenging to create in Finale way back when, but after reading your post I’m also not sure how easy it would be to recreate in Dorico. I have not tried it, so maybe for my old scores it would not be too problematic, but reading your post did make me think. Good luck!
These are beautiful! But yeah I’m not sure how they’d work being put into Dorico. I’ve gotten some really cool results in Dorico, don’t get me wrong. It’s a powerful software and I do feel a little more free to experiment with it. I just think that they can do a little better in this regard.
For sure. And that last one (my first minimalist work from the early 80’s) was a bear to create in Finale, in all honesty. I had to hide a lot of things (since I wanted it to play back correctly; the result is here). Thanks!
