I want to start by saying I’m aware of Dorico’s feature making it impossible to have a fermata and a breath mark at the same rhythmic position. We use this feature to our advantage a lot for recit.-like passages, so the orchestra can have one measure with a fermata, while the singers can have all sorts of things. (FWIW, we edit the music symbol “Breath Mark (Tick-like)” to not show anything, so it works quite well for our purposes.)
This feature has stopped working in one particular file:
I cannot find any documentation of this feature being altered in recent updates; the documentation still reads:
You can combine holds and pauses in the following ways:
Fermatas cannot exist at the same rhythmic position as any other hold or pause. Breath/Curlew marks override fermatas, causing them not to appear on the corresponding staves. Caesuras and fermatas permanently replace each other.
We could attempt to use a fake fermata playing technique for this to work, but since our use case is exclusively in measures where the orchestra is tacet, aligning the “fake” fermatas over the bar rest would be tedious. I’m hoping I am missing something simple!
Thanks for your reply. I should have been clearer — we don’t want the fermata to be shown in the vocal staff, only on the orchestra staves. Typically adding a breath mark at the same place as the fermata allows this to happen. But in this file, that override doesn’t occur as expected, and I cannot figure out why.
Perhaps I am mistaken, I don’t believe fermatas can be created as local marks.
The issue isn’t with the fermata being global, but rather the normal system of overriding the global fermata on one staff (adding a breath mark at the same rhythmic location) doesn’t work in this particular file.
[Edit: sorry, I realised just now that maybe you mean how it is performed live by humans? Because indeed the singer not having a fermata would not wait very long.]
So the singer can reach the C# while the accomp is still holding the E chord? How long do we suppose the accomp holds the chord after the singer reaches the C#?
It’s not off-topic to say that this is confusing and incorrect. The reason it’s not OT is because that’s precisely the reason it’s not easy to accomplish in Dorico.
You should not give a fermata to one player and not to another. My two cents!
If you really want to do this, I’d recommend making a custom playing technique that mimics a fermata.
Just for curiosity, is interesting to see how Dorico handles the fermata (that even if “hidden” outside the page still works normally in the playback) and the breath mark, visualising the played durations and the tempo track, with automatic gaps etc…
(I changed the melody so the voice notes are not hidden behind the piano notes).
For instrumentalists, absolutely. But many times in opera scores you find the instruments all have a fermata, while the vocal line is not marked because it is expected to be freely interpreted. Perhaps the singer is the only one taking a breath, or might embellish, etc. The conductor is following the singer in that case.
For this case I would drag it off the page as Christian showed.
It’s not a use case that comes up all the time (and we always do this after discussion with the composer and, typically, the premiering conductor), but it can help remove a lot of empty downbeats when the singers have extended unaccompanied passages.
The thing that confuses me is that it is possible in Dorico in general, quite easily — if I create a new file, adding a breath mark at the same rhythmic position as a fermata removes the fermata from that staff. But in this particular file, it doesn’t work, and I can’t figure out why.
Dear JoshDev, I understand your situation and I’m experiencing something similar while trying to resolve this. It looks like there might be a bug in Dorico. Currently, I’m working on an orchestral score with the cellos divided into four staves. The breath mark technique is functioning well on the first three, but it’s not working on the fourth cello. I’ve encountered similar issues with some brass and woodwind instruments—some function properly while others do not. I’ve checked all, but there are no strange settings in one of the four staves, so I am afraid we can’t do anything more at this moment. Hopefully, Dorico can help; I will send them my error file and keep you informed.
If you want help, @chrisabelen, your best bet is to cut down the project to the smallest chunk that exhibits the problem and post it here. Please see this (hopefully helpful) sticky thread:
Thank you for your reply.
I am using the forum almost every day since I started working with Dorico 2 months ago.
But nobody on the Forum could help a colleague with the same problem, so I posted it there first and did sent you a direct email as well (and I am contributing as much as I can).
About the size of the file, I am afraid when I copy it to a smaller size the problem could be gone, therefore I did sent you the file with the bug.
But I will try to diminish the file with the bug still in it and post it on the forum anyway.
To solve the problem I can make a workaround as suggested by adding the fermatas as playing techniques, but the breath mark option is still a very convenient way to add fermatas on different positions within a bar.
Finally, I would like to let you know that I am quite impressed how well Dorico has been set up, and developed.
After working with Finale for 35 years it takes some time to unlearn Finale, but every time I think Dorico has reached its limits there is always an option, also with a lot of help of the forum members (and you). Also the youtube tutorials by John and your colleagues are very helpful.
So I am pleased to know that I can deliver (and already did) new Dorico scores to the composers and publishers (Schott, B&H London, Donemus) which I am working for for many years.
Thank you for your time.
