When working on a large piece like an opera: When is it best to split into flows? From early on or as late as possible? What are your experiences of what works best for you?
I now already have 40 minutes of music in one flow, half of which is “material”, i.e. stuff that I know I’ll use, but which is not yet organised or finished. In the beginning of the file I have the “final work”, coming into existance bit by bit, by copying in the material from the end and working on its final linear form.
As the file gets larger, of course, Dorico gets slower, especially when adding bars or changing meters, etc. in the first half. So I recon, splitting into flows would speed things up a bit. But do I give away flexibility? I still would like to keep everything open and flexible, so that all changes like adding instruments, changing layout options, or whatever comes up later in the process, still stays consistent across the score.
So I guess my question is: What do we have to look out for, when beginning to split a larger work into flows while still working on the composition process to keep the process as open as possible?
For me, flows are often the containers for different sketches/versions of ideas, with robust names that help me ID them. So in my workflow they usually emerge quite early.
While a straightforward select-then-join/merge feature would be super nice, a bit of select-all with the system track and pasting certainly isn’t too cumbersome, and the organizational benefits to me of the early separate chunks outweighs that bit of effort.
Flows are great for holding sketches that you don’t immediately want to use. In their title, I date them and sometimes label them with what they are.
Often, if I’m working on a passage and sketch a continuity that I may or may not use, I’ll simply add extra bars to get it out of the way and provide space for a new sketch. Later, towards the end of the day, I’ll label them with the Text command and if I’m being virtuous split it off into a different flow.
For those of us composing in Dorico (in addition to preparing music for distribution), It would be very helpful if we could select some music and with a key command invoke Make Into Flow with an option to name the flow. Also, Append To Beginning/End of Flow_XX would be useful.
I tend to create a flow for each section of what I am composing. The nice thing about flows is one can add and remove them at will so anything that may no longer bo relevant to the project can be deleted (or exported then deleted for use with something else). As soon as I find that a flow is not useful, it is gone.
As for Dorico slowing down, I don’t encounter that except in large works using Cantai. Otherwise, it purrs along without effort. Available RAM might be the issue for slowing down. I had a 35 flow work resulting in over 3000 measures and had no problems with either my desktop at 32gb RAM or my laptop with 16gb RAM. (MacStudio or MBP with Apple Silicon).
Dorico will also slow down if you have many flows, even though they are small individually. My advice would be to just use flows as designed, i.e. to reflect the musical structure, and not to let technical considerations influence that. If the music is continuous for 40 minutes, then you have one 40-minute flow. If it turns out to be 20 two-minute movements, then split it.