I’ve been working on a Rule of the Octave worksheet in the background for historical improv practice. The FB is spelled out, and includes fingering and such as an aid. Anyhow I swear I was getting the fingerings, when below the note on Grand Staff, to be put on a seperate ‘line’ above the FB. But in this instance I see them side by side. The 3 in red is a fingering (it’s not a normal FB notation in any case)
I have to go through and manually set all the bass clef fingerings to be above the note, I can’t see why you’d ever want those down with the FB as it’s visually confusing. But in the case above with them being on the same horizontal space it’s doubly confusing. I only discovered this one because I forgot to hit the button to place it above. This is how it looks properly formatted
… and the plot thickens, continuing this key I added another fingering and it overlaid it with the FB when one is there, yoinks! Maybe Dorico is running out of vertical space?
By default, Dorico will put left-hand fingerings below the left-hand staff, which is conventional. I think it’s pretty unconventional to have fingering and figured bass in the same score, so they don’t necessarily interact completely as you might expect.
What I suggest you do is preface each fingering you add with R, which will treat it as a right-hand fingering and put it above the left-hand staff instead of below.
Out of interest, why is this exercise in A-flat minor? (Not a good key in 1/4 comma Meantone!)
Secondly, in bar 3 the alto is in octaves with the bass. Does this not matter?
David
Historical improv - if your good - is where you can be given any key to improv upon. John Mortenson is a leader in this and has a book out on the subject if you’re interested. He also has a Patreon group I’m a part of. He relates that in live performances where an audience member picks the key, invariably it’s something with lots of sharps or flats . He was floored when somebody called for C major once.
This elaboration is from Furno via John, I don’t think he did any changes except possibly higlighting the decending [natural] 6 4 3 in bar 6 beat 1, the bracket being my addition to indicate the option of taking the passacaglia which is my favorite. At any rate I don’t see any historical issue with the Alto paralleling the bass at all, it’s an interior voice thus relatively ‘hidden’. Strict rule following only exists in the minds of theoreticians At any rate you hardly hear any issues which is why AFAIK that was a common practice.
