“But I stand by my prediction that sometime in the next decade a GUI notational product will be able to notate this simple rhythm without a workaround. I’ll bet it is Dorico.” (John Ruggero)
Congratulations to the Dorico team for solving THE problem in the 3.5 update!
We have in fact been working on this specific problem over the last couple of weeks.
It’s wonderful to see that we will likely have a solution to the “Dvorak Humoreske/Grieg Piano Concerto” conundrum. However, I did devise a convoluted but better looking workaround that I shared with a user once. Here a copy of the exchange:
Michele. It turns out that I found something of a workaround for this, although I would only use it if I had to create a flow with one or two examples of this “Dvorak Humoreske” beaming. Any more than that and it becomes a cumbersome task. However, in the interest of sharing, here is what I found.
Instead of the 32nd rest, write a note, preferable the same as the 32nd note.
Remove stem and ledger lines trough the properties panel
In another voices, add four 32nd rest using force duration starting on the last quarter note of the bar. (move the caret there, type 3, o, comma, and then y four times in the new voice)
Hide the rests you don’t need
Flip the stems
Move the rest position through the properties panel
Now, in a lot of cases, using the “correct” rest (the third one) as the visible rest will result in the 32nd note flag to be a bit long (as the first bar of my example). What can be done to change this is use the 2nd 32nd rest as the visible one, and move the 3rd rest (or invisible note) closer to the next note using the note spacing tool. I realize this may not be up to engraving standards and of course it would be grand to have that beaming option natively. I do hope it comes reasonably soon, but in the meantime, I thought I would share it. It looks like this:
Great news!
I think I have another nice workaround, that preserves the default length of the partial beam:
Steps:
Only drawback: if there are ordinary groups of dotted eighths-and-sixteenths (quavers-semiquavers) at the same rhythmical position, the sixteenths/semiquavers will not exactly align with the sixteenths in the quintuplets, but it’s hardly conspicuous.
I guess, with a little (or a lot) of further tuplet nesting that could be solved as well, which is, as always, left as an exercise to the reader 
EDIT: Thanks Daniel!
HumoresqueQuintuplets.dorico.zip (813 KB)
not to be “that guy” but Sibelius has been able to do this with no problems since at least version 4, & this has been one of the (very few remaining) reasons I still occasionally use it & have yet to shell out for Dorico 3.
I can’t think of any music publishers that notate secondary beams over rests the way Dorico does (or Finale does), (see attachments)—it genuinely does seem to just be a software architecture issue, rather than something anyone would choose for aesthetic value.
It’s not a “software architecture issue”, whatever that is: we can make the software do whatever it needs to do, subject to being able to spend sufficient time and energy on addressing those requirements. Dorico uses a single primary beam in those cases because that is the recommendation of “Behind Bars” and of other publisher style guides, though obviously it is not a convention universally followed. As I’ve already said in this thread, we have been working on this in the very recent past, and it will be possible in the next version of Dorico to produce secondary beams like your three examples completely automatically, if that is the convention you want to follow.
Thank you Daniel. I’ll be glad to use that feature in next version then !
Glad it’ll be fixed.
I know I’m a bit late to the discussion, but I would like to say the single connecting beam in these examples is not only ugly, but even quite confusing and therefore wrong, because it suggests a connection of eighths/quavers, adding up to a quarter/crotchet. I’m afraid I have to correct you, Daniel, but Gould does not recommend it.
Although this exact rhythm isn’t covered in Behind Bars, Gould states on p.157: “(…) semiquaver beams must join groups that add up to the value of a semiquaver — it is incorrect for only a quaver beam to do this.”
On p.165, second example, bar 3, there’s a rhythm almost like we’re discussing here. It has a double beam over the 32nd rest.
… Except in bar 3 of the second example, where the secondary beam is correctly retained because it connects two groups of 32nd notes/rests, each adding up to a semiquaver/16th.
Yes, of course. I missed that. My mistake.
Congratulations to the Dorico team for solving the Grieg-Dvorak problem in the 3.5 update!
