How come curly brace for choir reduction?

Hello Dorico experts!

I wonder why when I create a choir reduction part it appears with piano bracket? I want to see it the right way. Can this bracket be changed?
Thanks for your time.


I’m sure other people will chime in with varying views, but in my opinion there’s nothing wrong with a curly Brace for reduced choir score. True, you’ll more often see a ‘square’ bracket in this situation, but that doesn’t mean it’s ‘right’ and the other is wrong. The curly Brace is used for a lot of things besides piano-- Violins I and II in orchestral scores, just to name one other example.

Yeah, but it’s quite wrong for me. As a choral conductor and arranger I want the choral score to look the right way. I’ve never seen any professional choral score where staves joined by piano brace.

My take is that the “reduction” is for a piano accompanist to accompany the (unaccompanied) singers at rehearsals. It’s not intended for the singers themselves.

But it’s in the ‘Singers’ sub-group and labelled as Choir, not Piano for Choir reduction. (you can see in on the attached screenshot).
And if you are right, how to make choir reduction staves with square brackets?

If it was intended as a rehearsal piano instrument, I guess it wouldn’t load with broken barline and vocal Halion sounds as default…

Very reasonable remark. And I would add, if it was a rehersal piano it wouldn’t be labelled as 'Choir", right? So, we have an issue here?

I will see whether we can change this for the next update, Lazaruss. I agree that using a square bracket is probably more conventional than a brace.

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Perhaps the ability for the user to select the typo of bracket and sub-bracket in every situation would be helpful.

Of course, once you can edit instrument types it will be possible for you to make this choice, but, as I’ve said before, unfortunately building the full set of user interface needed to edit instrument types is not in scope for our next update.

Thanks for the reply, Daniel. I’m lots of users will be happy to see this update and features they used to have in other notation software. Thank you and all your colleagues for the great job you are guys doing.

Hello Daniel
I note your comment here in 2017 about Choir Reduction brackets.
Since my Dorico 3.5 is still setting up a curly piano brace for Choir Reduction, I guess this change hasn’t been made yet.
I share the view of the others in this thread that the straight brace is much more conventional for a choral reduction.
Could this be the default in the new Dorico 4, pls?

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For the time being, you can of course change the bracket style in Engrave mode; though you will have to repeat this for every flow.

Not meaning to “bump”, but rather, I ran into the following issue today and went searching which resulted in me finding this thread.

I have a series of motets that were intended to be a cappella, but I was contacted by a choir director who would really like a reduction part because her choir is not capable of pulling these pieces off without a little help. I agreed to generate a reduction for her since I knew it would be relatively trivial to accomplish with Dorico.

Now, I use the ‘choir reduction’ instrument nearly every day on some project or other, however most of my projects are single files and typically single flows within those single files. Lots of psalm settings and small, single-movement SAB/SATB motets. In this case however, there are a series of small motets all within the same file since they were written and intended as a collection to be sung together.

Having added the choir reduction instrument to the file, I went to change it from a curly brace to a square brace and was surprised I had to do it for every flow individually. Not a big deal in the end, (and I can see advantages to this approach!) but the thought immediately occurred to me, “I wish there was a preference for this, or barring that, a choice between a ‘choir reduction (curly brace)’ or ‘choir reduction (square brace)’.”

This particular instrument is very useful since the barlines do not intersect, and it can be used as an actual piano ‘reduction’ as alluded to above, but it is equally handy to use it for condensing purposes. I suppose this latter function will eventually be rendered redundant by advancements to the condensing feature, but nevertheless, in the meantime there are legitimate reasons to use both bracket types.

Aren’t reduction parts usually written for a keyboard grand staff below the independent vocal lines, sometimes in a slightly reduced size?

…Not that you don’t know what the conductor expects, having talked with her directly.

They are in normal scores. But I’m not re-engraving an entire suite of motets! I’m just generating a separate “choir reduction part” that has the music on condensed staves that she can use alongside or in place of the motet booklet itself. So in this case, it is totally separate and truly does represent the vocal music (and, in fact, you could sing from it if you wanted to).

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