Oh, I know there are many who will die on that hill, defending cutawawy scores.
I’m actually ok with it, as long as it really does have some musical logic to it and brings something to the score, rather than just “looking cool” (I’ve seen FAR too many university student projects using cutaway scores where it was entirely pointless in those cases.)
but hey, if Dorico implements it in the awesome fashion that the team implement everything they do, I’m sure it will make for a LOT of happy campers.
Reminds me a bit of a friend of mine who once gave a masterclass in a small, regional University and had a student play some Mozart. Said student then sassily pushed-back on some of the instructions because she proclaimed “I don’t really like Mozart anyway”. He then proceeded to inform her that it was irrelevant since as a musician, she is expected to play Mozart well, and even more importantly, expected to teach it.
I’ve never been a fan of cutaway scores as a conductor, even those as far back as the late Stravinsky stuff. But it is an industry standard, and as such I am very happy that Dorico is working on this feature (as Michel says, it will likely be done with flair!). It is requested by many publishers and absolutely has an important place in the notation landscape. And let’s face it … Haydn’s Symphony No. 45 is a cutaway score!
Wasn’t sure which comment to reply to with a follow-up. I have other questions besides the cutaway aspect. How possible is it do the instrument names and brackets the way I’ve created in this example? Can you do these name changes, from plurals (fls) implying the whole section to specific numbers (fls 2,3)? And can you make these neat brackets with the instruments having opaque boxes around them to clear the way? How about the thick left-line connecting instrument families?
The thick left line connecting instrument families is there by default as are the rest of the brackets and the naming.
Changes within a single system from one staff grouping to another is not built in but you might find some kind of workaround - usually grouping changes (ex. having two flutes combined on one staff and then on separate staves) happen at system boundaries and this is handled well.
I’m not sure about the exact placement of the instrument name over the bracket, you might have to futz with settings for that because the instrument name won’t be overlapping the bracket by default. You can get everything very close to that by default, but may have to fiddle with advanced options if you want to get even closer, or may have to result to increasingly complicated kludges if you really really want a specific exact number of pixels between something and something else and not one pixel less or more. Dorico generally makes it easy to get very very close to what you want but generally people are happy with getting 99% of the way there especially if getting 100% takes a huge amount of extra effort with diminishing returns.
In case it helps, here is an engraving I did of something slightly older (Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mlada Suite) which shows the out of the box bracketing and grouping etc that you get with Dorico without a lot of fuss (i.e. this is just using built in functions and settings without spending too much time on it). Some systems have instruments split onto individual staves and others have them combined - I can choose system by system what I want grouped. Sometimes the horns are divided in different ways on different systems - sometimes two staves with 123 and 456 but other times different. I was trying to follow the original engraving to make proofing easier.
Your engraving looks great very clean! Thanks for the info. Admittedly, in Finale, I had to put in a lot of floating text boxes and move them manually to achieve some of the instrument names. In my testing so far seems like text boxes are a no-brainer for Dorico.
Text boxes are quite doable in Dorico and work well but for replacing the normal brackets/names with very specific ones you want you might have to go into Engrave mode and add text boxes attached to specific exact coordinates of the page. The downside of this is making edits that change the spacing could mean that these are now in the wrong spot and have to be adjusted. So I would try fiddling with the advanced settings for the brackets and instrument labels first to get closer to what you want without having to resort to floating box workarounds. If you know you aren’t making edits and the score is 100% done, no changes so nothing will move at all, then adding a text or graphics box in engrave mode could work for this.
What is the technique for doing this in Dorico. I’m a Finale user so I’m not super familiar with Dorico but need to be able to make cut aways to move my scores over. I can do it in easily in MuseScore and Finale, but not sure where you did to do this in Dorico, even after I download and opened your file.
The key commands to simulate cutaway scores in Dorico are Add Staff Above, Add Staff Below and Remove Staff. After selecting the rhythmic position at which a staff should be added to or removed from the instrument held by a single player, all of these commands can be reached by selecting Edit > Notations > Staff or by right-clicking and choosing Staff from the context menu.
@johnkprice, your example project with the cutaway score only has 4 players (ww, sax, brass, perc), using a ton of staff additions/deletions. So OK, it looks very cool, but how are you going to produce separate parts from a score like this?
I would assume it would involve manual extraction of parts by having a separate “parts score” that isn’t cutaway, which is why an official cutaway score function would be preferable.
I have been told I should not worry too much about cues when it comes to wind players, especially brass, as they are used to be counting empty bars. The same might be true for the violas, for the percussion players it’s definitely true.
