I have a few questions for users who have experience with engraving large vocal works (Mass, Opera, Oratorio, …) in Dorico:
In case a Mass (or multi-movement work) is all “attacca”, with at best a fermata at the end of each section, would you still use flows or try to write everything together? It is about 1000 bars in length and will use open key signature
When a singer enters the first time in an opera context, it is usual to have no staff label and the character name above the first entrance. How would you create this? Each singer holds two instruments, one with full name and one with empty name? Or is there another, smarter way?
For the choir, which could go from 2 staves (SA+TB) with two voices each to 5 divisions for the women alone in a single section, what would you suggest as starting instrument? The grand staff for the choir or four section singers inside a group? Or yet another option?
I may have other questions, but these are the main ones to get things started.
Thank you!
Buona sera Michele !
I will tell you how I deal with those questions but I don’t think my workflow is better than any other…
For 1. I don’t see why you wouldn’t use Flows. They have flow headings which are extremely practical (I think flow headings are quite underrated in Dorico, they can be formatted, you can create as many flow headings templates as you wish, etc) and make the whole work easier to navigate.
For 2. use staff text. I created a paragraph style, saved as default and gave it its own shortcut. I’ve been using it for years now, it’s very efficient. I can alt-click those names if they come quite often, move them, hide them in some layouts… Of course, I’d rather have an automated solution, but nothing comes close to that yet.
For 3. I’d say it depends on the work… What do you want the singers to have on their score? That should define your workflow there.
Thank you @MarcLarcher and @pianoleo!
The point for (1) is that there may not be flow headings as the composer wrote everything together, in one endless—well, 70 minutes long—piece. There are system text titles above each “Kyrie” “Credo” etc, but there is no break. My fear would be to have an unapproachable casting off scenario in parts which play less than others. I guess it will be harmless to try both approaches in the initial sessions.
I must have explained myself quite poorly since both you and @pianoleo didn’t get my need. Let me try again! I need something like this (realised in Sibelius):
The top singer (Afira) has been singing for a few systems and therefore shows an ordinary staff label. The bottom singer is entering just now and thus shows no staff label and a “name-text” near the first entry. This is all following Gould’s recommendations, btw.
While I guess I could follow Leo’s divisi suggestion to show the name instead of a more practical staff text, how would I hide the staff label only for one system? In Sibelius I had a dedicated copy of the soloist with empty full and short name.
For (3), lol, I once again didn’t specify that this was the full score. In the vocal score I believe I should show the uncondensed staves throughout, at least this is what I understood to be more practical for singers. So, the score can have condensed choir staves, but there being several divisions, how would you approach this? What players/instrument would you choose at score creation?
Trying to revive this post because it had not received any feedback on my last request (see post from November 13th).
Now, the most pressing matter is: if I have a single choir which, in the score, would alternate between the usual SA+TB to S+A+T+B, and which, in a couple of specific occasions, uses a five-part female-only section (still the same people, just silent male voices and 5-part female), what would the best approach in Setup mode be?
Four separate section voices with careful condensing groups in place and with divisi when needed? A single Choir Reduction player with divisi?
Condensing from SATB to SA/TB does not yet work very well. Lyrics that tend to become convoluted unless handled with kid gloves and workarounds are one drawback so far (as of Nov 2024).
I have not tried SA/TB with divisi used to split out the separate SATB voices, but that suggests it would work better.
Some have suggested using separate SATB and SA/TB players and using deft system breaks to split the music between them. It might work in some situations, but I have never found the need for compression sufficient in my work to go to the trouble.
I need to be careful, then, since this is a 70-min-long work and I need to pick the right choice from the start.
The vocal score will have everything “decondensed” but the full score may require “condensing” into SA+TB on specific occasions.
To give more explicit advice, I expect folks here would need to see Dorico-file excerpts of some segments of your score that strike you as areas that would give you problems of the sort you mention.
That way they/we can give specific advice based on specific information.
I don’t yet have a file to show, and this does not treat the voices in any unconventional way.
It is just my first choral work in Dorico and am curious to hear from users what approaches work and what do not.
Perhaps a reduction as a starting point with the appropriate divisions could do everything I need. Basically: twice in the piece the female staff needs to be divided into 5 and when the texture is dense the SA+TB needs to become S+A+T+B.
This will have one downside, though, I would need to create something different for the vocal score which needs to be S+A+T+B throughout. This is the (main!) source of my confusion.
What do you think?
Without exactly understanding your setup Michele, can’t you not have everything on extra players/staves and just show them, where needed?
Secondly, if you need to “hide” a staff label, you could just fake this by covering the label with white spaces…
Sorry for the long wait.
I have managed to put together a mockup project with the 4 scenarios I may encounter.
SATB
SA+TB
hidden TB + divisi SA
restoring
To do that, I had to:
create 2 custom condensing groups (SA+TB) from 4 section players
add a condensing change (CC) to the first system saying not to condense
manage condensing and divisi on a system-by-system basis.
To me it seems a rather robust system, assuming then that lyrics do not cause issues when condensing. The whole idea of this post was to check with someone who had already broken their nose with this whether it was a sound approach or not.
The other approach, starting from a Choir (reduction), seems not to be a good idea to me (check Flow 2 of the attached project).
Adding a divisi to the staff requires to add 3 division for a total of 4 staves, and one cannot comfortably manage what stave is what. Names will not appear, or I am missing which is unclear to me. So, this doesn’t seem a good start.
Now that you have the setup, please advise on how you feel it would be best to proceed and, possibly, what is happening strange in Flow 2.
Thanks! Choral mockup.dorico (573.3 KB)
