Hello. This is the last measure of a choral score; only the piano has an outro, while the soprano and bass parts only have rests. Is there a way to add fermatas only to the piano notes and hide the fermatas in the soprano and bass parts, which only have rests? Thank you.
This option is not provided by Dorico. The best way to achieve it is to create a Playing Technique with the fermata symbol, and to apply it exactly where you want.
You can also drag the unwanted fermatas outside the score in Engrave Mode (I never tried this though, but some users say it works!).
I’m not sure what difference maintaining fermatas on rests could possibly make.
While rests in the middle or those associated with notes likely have a function, it seems acceptable to omit fermatas in places consisting of whole rests. It would be great if you could add a feature to hide them depending on the user and the situation. Thank you.
you could even remove the last couple of bars for players with only rests in them, and let those players wonder why the rest of the orchestra is still playing too ![]()
In conventional Western music, this would almost never be appropriate from a notation perspective as I believe to be the case of the example that you provided. (I use “almost never” for always and never tend to be lies we tell ourselves.) However, in more avant-garde music I can envision an instrument or a voice being held indefinitely (for example, if the instrument/voice is intended to slowly diminish to null at the discretion of the player/singer/conductor) while other instruments or voices continue. Typically, though, we would notate the held voice as tied through whatever count of measures (excuse me Dorico, “bars”) we want it held.
So, I do not see using a hidden fermata in your example as being appropriate but I might be supportive of that option in atypical, modern composition. Your example, if not being the last measure, would be confusing to players/singers/conductors. Nevertheless, flexibility and the ability of users to control odd uses of notation should be a goal of any notation software. Yes it makes it a challenge to provide support but quite appropriate if incorporated as an option with the ability to easily revert to the default.
If this score originates from a YouTube video it’s probably not suitable as a good reference.
Of course, it might not be the case, but I mentioned it because I thought it would be good to use the hide function depending on the situation. Thank you.
I figure the message here of having the fermata only in the keyboards part is that the chorus can count to four to honor the rest and then clean up their music and depart while the keyboard player sits and holds the chord.
Now that sounds like a church choir to me! ![]()
This discussion pops up all the time, and someone always says this, and I say the same thing every time. I shall do so this time as well, as follows:
If this is true, you should definitely hire a medium and ask them to inform Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Price, Sullivan, Gershwin and Stravinsky that they are all wrong and you are right. You can probably write and tell Rutter, Ades, Macmillan and Schwartz yourself….
Or, perhaps Dorico could implement this feature which is used all the time by pretty much every composer ever (for example in every recitative ever written), instead of relying on the horrible hacky workaround that it does…. (Score one to musescore!)
Sources, please.
How did you do that? I’m curious.
I would settle for one that applies to the case brought in by OP, instead of any number of those like the ones you have presented, which are examples of perfectly valid, but very narrowly fitting special conventions, all in accordance with the deeper nature of the fermata in Western notation. Basically, these are all variations on the theme of “everyone else has to wait for exactly one other player to finish their solo”. The issue in question, though, would imply literally the opposite, and finding examples for that will be considerably more difficult, I’d imagine.
Which makes no more sense than it did originally but only requires extra work for no effect.
I mean, sure. I wouldn’t do that at the end of a piece, but the point is that this particular composer did, and the person who gets to say what is in the music is the composer. And if the publisher’s software can do it, and Dorico is the very best software out there, then logically, Dorico should be able to do it as well.





