Condensing divisi strings (Ligeti alike)

Dorico
1

Hi all,

My question regards condensing huge strings division for scores like Ligeti, Boulez, etc. More specifically parts, where it seems I can’t achieve what I want. I’ll try to explain it in detail.

Lets stick to VIOLIN I and say I have 14 players (7 stands). How I proceed:

  1. at the beginning of the score I make a divisi for 14 section players.
  2. for the parts, I have 7 different ones, labeled as following: 1.2. / 3.4. / 5.6. / 7.8. / 9.10. / 11.12. / 13.14
  3. In manual staff visibility for the parts, I only show the respective players and hide others. (show 1 and 2, hide all others)

For the full score, I write the piece normally and then condense everything. One page I might 2 system for example, 1-6 and 7-14, then the next page I might have 1-4 and 5-14, and another one with each stand 1-2, 3-4, 5-6 etc. You’ve probably seen that in Ligeti our Boulez. Until here everything fine, Dorico does everything basically automatically.

Now back to parts:
For the 1st music stand (players 1-2), two staves are shown. Most of the time I’ll avoid writing different music for 2 players with one stand, so they will mostly play unissono. The problem is, if I try to condense the parts, I can’t condense only section players 1-2. Dorico will condense all 14 string players and my “hack” doesn’t work anymore. Instead of showing a condensed player 1/2, as I defined in the manual staff visibility, when I condense the parts Dorico will show all string music written. What I’ve been doing to “manually” condense is to hide player 2 where they play unissono and show it where I need both staves shown.

Any ideas how I can improve my workflow?

Thanks guys!

2

On the top of my head, and if I have understood the issue correctly, that you have a single section player divided into 14 parts, I would create a custom condensing change in the 1.2 part so that you would have 1.2 in a separate staff.
Then, use a Staff Visibility Change to hide 3-14 wherever they appear.

Again, this assumes I have understood the issue.
Please show us some pictures or a cut-down project if you can.

3

Dorico’s divisi feature unfortunately doesn’t have any way to track the individual players within the section, so extracting each player/desk’s part is really difficult to do.

For something as complicated as 14-way divisi, you might be better creating 14 solo players, then using the condensing feature to combine them on the score and parts as required.

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4

Oh, obviously! That was it. I totally forgot about the custom condensing change. That’s it.

Thank you so much.

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