How might one best do this (see screenshot below) in Dorico? Spoken dialogue is shown above and below a system of music. Based on my limited experience to-date, I’m worried about how Dorico might try to space the music vertically, and wondering what non-default settings might achieve something close to what I have here (or indeed do something better).
This is from a piece written in 2019. Although the instrumental parts, the vocal score and the full score were all prepared (and I was paid the agreed commission fee), Covid came along and performance plans were abandoned. I’m now thinking of revisiting the piece.
You’ll find a number of threads in the forum about incorporating dialogue or narration in a score.
I think you could accomplish the above with staff text attached to the top and bottom staves. The drawback is that you’d need to go into the bassoon and piano layouts and hide the text there (and repeat this for each piece of text).
Another approach would be text frames in the score layout. Because frames are layout-specific, they would appear only in the score. But adding these frames would have to be one of the last steps in your layout process, because frames are tied to pages, not music; if something happens to make the music flow onto different pages, you’d need to move the text frames. Also, adding frames to a page creates a page override, and that page will no longer respond to changes to the underlying page template.
Hi @DavidWard, here an example of a possible way to do it: using a dedicated Dialogue/Narrator 1-line instrument, a custom Paragraph Style (with white background), a border inserted with the Properties Panel, and some offset/s [you can do Select More for the dialogue chunks, as they all use the same Paragraph Style, and adjust them all at once]. I also used Note Spacing Changes, to make place for the text chunks.
The advantage of this method, is that you can notate relatively precisely when the text should be spoken, in relationship to the rhythmic position:
Christian,
Do the white-background text boxes now cover up the measure rests (as I do not think they always did in the past) or is another technique needed for that?
Hi @Derrek,
I set the measure rest Opacity to 0% (for the dialogue staff).
But as you see in bar 1 the fermata, for example, is covered by the white background PS text (which is what I want). This only works if you don’t use the Border in the Paragraph Style, but rather create the border using the properties panel. (For some reason the border in the paragraph style eliminates the effect of the white background.)
This seems potentially to be a good way of doing it, although there’s an earlier page (see screenshot added below) where this might possibly be a little more awkward (or not?). Most of the remaining 161 pages of the full score are free of spoken dialogue, although there is the occasional spoken line here and there which I think could be attached to the relevant vocal stave.
If doing it this way, what is the most reliable way to make note spacing changes for a single bar, while leaving Dorico to space the bars either side naturally? In my recent piece for 2 singers, 1 actor and piano, when I tried moving the bar line handle in Engrave mode, it seemed liable to create spacing havoc.
I think Christian is using the Note Spacing Change tool from the Engrave menu to enlarge the space between notes on a bar-by-bar basis rather than dragging the barlines around in Engrave mode, which gives just the result you describe.
here the page with my suggested method. It is a little work, but each one can decide if this method works for the desired result (for me has worked several times…):
@Derrek Actually in this example, bar 5, I added some XXXX in the text, and assigned a white background to them, to cover the fermata: where there are no letters, the white background of the Paragraph Style, doesn’t cover the fermata. @Derrek Edit: you can also insert empty spaces, instead.
