I’m working on some parts for “Aida” for our horn section and have a couple of observations that I hope can be addressed.
I’ve created a small illustrative file with one horn player holding (virtually) 4 horns: Bb alto, F, D, and Bb basso. This leads to my first question – how can I properly label the Bb horns? I’d like to see “Hn in Bb basso” (or alto) on the horn part but the closest I could get was editing the horn short name to “Hn Basso”. However, as you can see below, that solution doesn’t really read correctly.
In not always obvious if you’re playing Bb alto vs basso so it would be great if I could label the transposition that way.
Second, the default lower horn instruments seem to have an unnecessary octave “transposition”. The transposed view of the above passage should show bar 10 “Hn Basso in Bb” as a D5, not a D4. It should not transpose to be the same as the Bb alto horn in bar 1.
This can be explained by the default instrument definition for “Horn (basso) (B Flat No key sig)” that I used (screen shot below) – concert middle C sounds as C3, not C4. So I should have input the whole note an octave higher??? I don’t know why this is – if you change the C3 to C4 in the instrument definition then the transposition works and, on play back, the note sounds in the octave it should.
During the time when horns in different transpositions were common, I don’t think concert scores were used – I’ve certainly never seen one. I’m not sure what the “correct” treatment would be in that kind of score, but this Dorico default seems odd to me. The Bb basso does have a fundamental an octave lower than the Bb alto, but I don’t know why it should be treated as octave transposing in a concert score.
In practice the Hn occurrences are redundant because there is actually no instrument change. And also the To… assignment is not necessary. The current transposition at the beginning of the music is sufficient. And the layout name is supposed to be just Horn.
This is a very limited approach as concert pitch is not correct. You cannot proof by listening to your score or share the audio. Also cannot produce a non-transposing part. So not a solution for me.
I have a pretty good solution to labelling the Horn in Bb Basso part – seems obvious now. In Engrave mode, with the instrument change label selected, I can insert custom text to override the default “Hn in Bb” label.
