Coordination lines for example. They also work in layouts with multirests. I have already updated an old score and parts! You have to do the two layouts individually, but it’s VERY slick.
5 Likes
I think anything that can be utilized in a variety of settings, including affiliated areas of music composition and performance, is a very good thing, and this speaks well of the great efforts of the Dorico team, along with all the feedback from users.
3 Likes
There is no doubt that automatic cutaways and proofreading features are groundbreaking and deserve headline treatment. But I’d like to also mention how useful and very much appreciated the smaller improvements are. And there are a lot of those. Thank you!
6 Likes
There are more besides - the complex scores of Ferneyhough for example, and I think some Takemitsu scores.
I don’t see any harm in it - the cutaway score is usually for the benefit of a conductor - nobody else may be bothered by it. There are some chamber music exceptions though. You might think of it as an approach to notation that is influenced by the reductionism of Kandinsky - an attempt to innovate and redefine what a score is in the same way that brutalism redefined architecture.
Plus the scores look really cool - that’s why I like them.
Finished that reply and thought - hold on, I’ve missed something out. Takemitsu scores are based on blocks of texture, and Xenakis built pieces like buildings out of layers of sound. The cutaway scores reflect this intention and in the interest of conveying composer intention they do serve a purpose.
Also they look cool - did I mention that?
2 Likes
Not to prolong this, but I know there are others. But they do tend to be more “cerebral” like Ferneyhough, Xenakis, etc. rather than folks like me. Personally, I do like many of Xenakis’ works, along with some of Boulez’s etc. It has nothing to do with the music itself, but how it’s displayed. So long as musicians/conductors have no issue with it, that’s fine. I don’t think it’s controversial. I just felt I personally was doing it as an affectation more than for a substantive reason, and went back to non-cutaway scores with the one exception of the first page of that work for six instruments I posted.
Hard for me to say the cutaway version of this work for piano, violin and cello I wrote over two months in 2017 looks more cool than the version I posted on my web site, but it’s all in the eye of the beholder. This was with Finale, but it likely would have been easier with Dorico, even with Finale’s existing ability to do cutaway scores. I didn’t figure out a fix for the clefs at the left side of the page until later.
2 Likes
Indeed - tangentially - I’ve had a lot of stick before for using perforated barlines - what’s their purpose here?
You can run both versions. Dorico 6 will not overwrite version 5.
1 Like
I’m using cutaways in a fugue analysis. It makes entries clearer.
2 Likes
Ah, I use it because I like the look. That’s all.
1 Like
The “neatnik” in me proposes that this general “philosophical” discussion of cutaway scores be moved either to one of the existing topics or a new one. It would be handy to maintain a Dorico-implementation-specific thread for things separately.
3 Likes
Playing around in D6 now, exploring cutaway features and alternate chords. Wondering if a couple of things are available that I’m just not finding:
-
An option show player names on the grayed-out cutaway staves, to assist with any addition of material in the middle of a big blob of empty staves.
-
An option to automatically parenthesize successive chord symbols above line 1. So, for example, have Q [line 1] “Fmaj7”; [line 2] “F#min7b5 B7b9” automatically produce:
(F#min7b5 B7b9)
Fmaj7without having to invoke Properties and manually adjust the start and end parentheses/rounded brackets.
(If those options do not yet exist I offer them — with full gratitude for what’s already amazingly new in 6.0.0! — as feature-request s for some future update.)
1 Like
Something like the shadow names that appear in Galley View. I agree, this would be nice.
I like this idea, but you might run into issues about where the parentheses should start and finish. I’m trying to think of what rules I would want. Always start at the first occurrence in a system? Restart if an entire bar passes in between? Something like this?
Dorico would need to be able to adjust those as needed if you made further edits too.
2 Likes
Maybe something about how one navigates to the next chord location would work to signal to Dorico when to keep parentheses “alive” or close them…?
1 Like
Same here with large ensembles, but I can see Fill View being my default because it’s so much easier to scroll vertically than horizontally. I can scroll vertically easily all day with my mouse but horizontally causes me to reach for the scroll bar. Sure, I have the option of doing the same with the side thumb-wheel on my mouse, but it’s awkward.
1 Like
If I may be brutally honest, it looks a little bit like a solution looking for a problem… 
I mean, in reality, alternate changes aren’t occurring all that often, and manually setting the switch for the parentheses shouldn’t be too much of a chore now, should it? Plus, you’d have total control over the duration of the parentheses…
B.
They are.
1 Like
That depends on one’s musical reality. The kinds of things shown in @FredGUnn’s example above are actually extraordinarily common in jazz.
1 Like
Alright, fair enough, I yield the floor, have at it… 
1 Like
Cutaways were also used in some eighteenth-century operas.
For example, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (insertion of dialogue) or Handel’s Alcina (organisation of recitativo).
So I’m very pleased that Dorico 6 (finally) offers this function.