This is probably an unusual situation, but I am transcribing one or two monologues from the early 1900s. The lyrics are above the stave (no problem), but not attached to notes. However, they are above and meant to be spoken over particular chords.
It is simple enough to use hard spaces to keep a line of text together in a single lyric that would usually be given to a single syllable. However, this only works if there is no leading syllable. A workaround suggested on the Facebook group is to add hidden and silenced notes, but surely there should be a more elegant solution?
Text frames in Engrave mode are possible, but this will not make bars space as required.
Is there a better way?
This is an example of one (silly) monologue in question (from 1915).
Not that unusual, actually! This is also needed with chant on a reciting tone. Lyrics in Dorico are actually attached to beat positions rather than notes, so they can still be shifted to another beat later.
For this example I would:
Copy the entire monologue text in a text editor, with a newline for each bit of text that’s separated by more than a regular space. Replace all the spaces with a non-breaking space. (Or two, if you want to recreate this over-padded Victorian typesetting!)
Copy all the text, and paste a line at a time into the lyrics popover in Dorico. Put them on the nearest note, and you can shift them later.
Select all the monologue lyrics and left-align in Properties
I will have to leave off here for now. More details soon.
I’m certainly not interested in recreating it exactly. Left-aligning certainly helps, but I think I will need to manually break staves and sometimes place individual leading words in their own lyric boxes. If you have more suggestions they will be welcome.
Yes, you will need some manual breaks – unless the whole piece is 4 bars per system and you want to just set a fixed casting-off. But at least the lyric blocks should avoid colliding with each other automatically.
Actually, now that I look at this patter more closely, it suggests quite specific rhythms in 6/8! Let me work on this for a while and come back to you.
I entered the rhythms on a 1-line percussion staff (with one note per word, not syllable), and pasted in the words. I then installed a 0-line staff that I got from this post, created a new player, copied the contents of percussion into it, and deleted the percussion staff.
No hard spaces are needed, and Dorico casts off normally. I did this myself so you can inspect the methods and copy if you wish. The meter could be hidden by adding & hiding an independent 6/8. I’m not sure the best way to omit the barlines.
More tech details
I was able to select all the text of the graphic in Preview on Mac and copy it into a text editor, so I barely even had to type anything!
I was curious about the composer/author, so I Googled “Penderby Pit” and the first (and only useful) hit was your post above with the text inside the graphic already indexed – less than 2 hours after you posted! (Is this creepy yet?)
All this year I have been collecting and transcribing songs from R. P. Weston and Bert Lee, two writers known as the Gilbert & Sullivan of Music Hall. They wrote some 3000 songs over a 20 year period from 1915. I am using Audiveris (having tried a couple of others) and Dorico for the main work, but so that I can make them available to the public I am uploading them through Musecore to here: https://musescore.com/user/58/sets/7094749
This is interesting and might solve the problem for Dorico, apart from the bar lines. However, when exported to MusicXML and re-imported into Musescore, it generates a full stave and notes with no stems! But it might have to be re-done in Musecore in a different way anyway.
I think my best option might be to add 1/8 notes on a second voice that I can make silent and invisible rather than a second staff. The notes can even be cue size or reduced to 1% as someone else suggested.
I’ve only just seen your latest, so I will look after this. What I have done that isn’t bad is add 6 x 1/8 notes to every bar as a top G, added the lyrics to them without breaking syllables, i.e. skip unwanted beats, scaled the notes to 1% and made them white and opaque. You cannot just make them opaque, because that only affects the notehead. It is also important not to have the notes on a ledger line, because that isn’t affected by the colour. I also set casting off to be 4 bars per stave.
Make a selection (it doesn’t matter if it includes everything). Filter notes and rests, filter voices (in this case) upstem voice 1 and reset the hide notehead and hide stem properties.
Just found it. If I hide noteheads and stems in Engrave mode it looks the same as yours. I think we are now on the same page – literally! I will send you the final score. The piece is a shaggy dog (tall) story.
