Condensed staves refuse to amalgamate

Dorico
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Dorico Screenshot
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Hello everyone. I have been working on a band score and I am running into an issue with condensing. I have the music set to condense into a single voice as much as possible, however the score is behaving as if this setting is turned off. I have seen topics about this issue before, however they have all been left unresolved. The solutions have really only been the condensing change dialog.

Referencing the screenshot, the flute parts should both be in the up-stem voice. It is in complete unison until m. 20, and the rhythm differs in m. 22. The down-stem appears after the rest in m. 16 and therefore the new phrase has begun, but this is the expected behavior of the “Prevent amalgamation” setting. I have included a screenshot of my settings to show what is active for the project, but it doesn’t seem to be recognizing them. Mid-phrase unisons are also on.

The music in the flute parts is exactly the same, and there are no altered properties of notes or anything. In fact, the flute 2 is even copied and pasted directly from the flute 1 part. So what else could be preventing it from amalgamating? In other topics, the answer often came from that there was a difference in rhythm or technique somewhere after all, but that is not the case here; the music was copied and pasted. Even if that were true in this case, it still shouldn’t be preventing all music from condensing into one voice if amalgamation is turned on. I am also curious about that a2 in m. 15–why is that placed there?

I will also state that I know about the condensing change dialog. My goal is to not have to use that though, because I don’t want to have to go on a hunting trip across my entire large wind ensemble piece to find everywhere this happens. Also, it will help with consistency in case I accidentally miss one. I will also say that this is a MusicXML import, and a lot of music was doing this by default. In some places, re-copying and pasting worked, but not everywhere. It would be wonderful if there was a permanent solution that would cause the amalgamation to work as expected, because a temporary fix wouldn’t be a satisfying solution in my eyes.

I will admit that I’m fairly new to Dorico, so it’s a fair possibility that I’m missing a setting or something. If the answer is simply that the amalgamation setting isn’t what I thought it was or that its purpose isn’t what I expected, that’s totally fine, because at least I learned something. However, the only explanation I can think of at the moment is that it truly is a bug, which is fine too because at least I will have brought it to the attention of the Dorico team.

I have also attached an excerpt of the Dorico project. I would be very grateful to the active Dorico community for helping me solve this issue.

Condensing Issue.dorico (1.5 MB)

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Welcome to the forum @jaxoncastro,

The issue is that Dorico will condense music the same way for an entire phrase (Edit: Dorico calculates condensing on a phrase by phrase basis). A phrase is considered to be anything within rests.

In your case, at Bar 18, the Flutes split into different voices (which is what you would want). However, due to the facts listed in my previous paragraph, Dorico is displaying all the music this way back to the most recent rest (at Bar 12).

What you need to do is tell Dorico to “start a new phrase” where the Flutes split in the bar before Letter B.

Go to Engrave mode > click an item at that location > open the Condensing Change dialog > simply tick the Flutes in the left-hand column.

Dorico will now recalculate the condensing as though there is a rest there - you don’t need to change any condensing settings manually as such.

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Hello,

Thank you for your reply. I was a tad confused because as I was reading your reply, I was looking at the screenshot and I realized the bar numbers are different than in the project–my bad.

EDIT: For anyone else reading this, bar 12 is bar 16 of the screenshot, and bar 18 is bar 22.

I appreciate you bringing this to my attention. However, my original belief was that this is what amalgamations are for. If Dorico calculates phrases the same way no matter what, might I ask what the purpose of the amalgamation setting is?

Thank you

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I’m not sure how to answer that, sorry.

Perhaps something I’ve written needs correcting in order to make sense with regard to that question.

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Sorry, I probably wasn’t clear.

In the notation options, the amalgamation setting says that if an entire phrase can’t be combined into one voice because of different rhythms, then it can combine only the notes with the same rhythm into one voice and leave the parts with different rhythms in the down-stem voice.

It was my understanding that this is exactly what I’m trying to do. However, with that enabled the score doesn’t seem to be doing what it described. So my question was what exactly does amalgamation do then?

It’s weird because at certain points there are amalgamations, and I get things like this happening where something is preventing certain notes from combining into one voice even though the rhythm is the same:

Dorico Screenshot 2

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I’m not at my computer now but is this in the same project you attached?

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It’s from the project file the excerpt I attached came from, but I didn’t include it.

1 Like
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Upload that bit, if you can, and we can take a look. There is definitely something going on that can likely be fixed.

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That page is right here.

Condensing Issue 2.dorico (1.6 MB)

I also noticed that every note has force duration on. That might have something to do with it, but there is music that condensed correctly even with that.

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This might fix the appearance.
Select a note at the start of the affected section and insert a manual condensing change with the settings as in this pic.

MCC
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It will probably affect following notation, so you might have to insert another change and adjust its settings (Reset might do the trick).

MCC2
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Condensing Issue (edited).dorico (1.5 MB)

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Hello Steven,

Thank you for your reply; I really appreciate your help. The condensing change dialog is a great solution to fix unexpected condensing behaviors. However, I’m more interested in fixing the underlying problem that is causing these issues in the first place. If you know of any way we might be able to do this, any help would be greatly appreciated.

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It looks like you have some beaming overrides on those notes. Select the entire passage in both parts in Galley View, right click, and select Beaming > Reset Beaming, and the notes will amalgamate into a single voice.

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Hello JesterMusician,

Thank you so much; that solution worked great for most of the music. I guess that explains why it was doing that on a MusicXML import (I wrote it in Sibelius). That fixed the issue in the second example. Unfortunately, I still couldn’t get the music in the first example to amalgamate properly. You wouldn’t happen to know what’s wrong with that part, would you? I greatly appreciate it.

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If one works with .xml imported files, these are the kind if things that might appear and cause headaches.
A .xml import has to be stripped from all overrides, they cant be fixed by the general “Reset Appearance” command.
There might be explicit Rest lurking around, there might be clef overrides, there might be forced stems and beams. A “master” script could possibly iron these things out, until then it has to be done manually.

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Reset beaming on the grace notes, and add a Condensing Change at rehearsal mark B. (Or right before the following measure.)

Explanation: There are no rests in the entire passage, so it is considered one continuous phrase. Each part’s last slur has different rhythms, so they cannot be amalgamated, and this forces two voices for the entire phrase. Inserting a Condensing Change (with no overrides) breaks the phrase. Also, something’s up with the beaming on the grace notes, and this is also forcing two voices — resetting beaming here fixes that up.

EDIT: The presence of slurs over different rhythms requires the use of non-overriding Condensing Changes to split phrases in a passage such as this. You can see that if you delete the slurs, it will amalgamate the way you expect.

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Side note: Amalgamation for slurs (if enabled in Notation Options) is available only if the endpoints are at exactly the same rhythmic positions. In these cases, it’s not possible because one voice’s slur lands on a half note (so the slur “ends” on the start of the third beat) and the other lands on a quarter note (so the slur “ends” on the start of the fourth beat). Forcing the duration of the half note also allows the slurs to amalgamate, but this is probably undesirable.

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In my opinion, Dorico should consider in its amalgamation rules for slurs the duration of the endpoint notes to handle cases such as this one more elegantly. These notes do in fact end at the same time, and therefore so do the slurs, even if visually the slurs do not.

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The quickest way is to go to Preferences > MusicXML Import and untick pretty much everything in there before importing the MusicXML file.

If you don’t import the overrides there’s nothing to reset.

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Sorry, I haven’t had time to read the entire thread until now. I had to re-read the entry a few times for it to really sink in.

Yes, it was the slurs that did it. I have no idea why on Earth a difference in slurs prevents the entire phrase from combining; that seems unnecessary. You’re right: Dorico should probably handle the durations of slurs better. I just put a condensing change on the start of the slur and that combined everything. It may be tedious to do that for every time this happens in the score, but at least I have an explanation, which greatly improves my understanding of Dorico.

Also, that advice about the MusicXML import was very helpful. I will keep that in mind for the future. It didn’t end up being a factor in this case, however. As for the second example I posted, the reset beaming worked great. So I guess there were two things that were preventing music from combining. I really appreciate everyone’s help.

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Hello pianoleo,
I followed your advice and finally unticked all choices for .xml import.
Yes, this reduces the clean up significantly, thank you!
I get quite a few .xml files through PlayScore2. There are only two things I have to do after importing them to Dorico:
Select all, then ->Notation->Fingering->Reset Fingering and
Select the clefs and delete them (removes explicit clefs).
Then only fix very few little errors.

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