Music fragments in front matter

Hi,
Is it possible to include snippets of notation along with pieces of text in frames in front matter, as is standard with a page of performing instructions in contemporary music?
I can enter a frame with paragraphs of text but don’t seem able to include notation fragments along with that text.
Any help much appreciated.
Many thanks,
Peter

Hi Peter, welcome to the forum!

For anything more than individual characters (like a flat or sharp sign), you probably want a separate music frame to display musical fragments. You can use flow/player filters to specify the music you want to display. Adding extra flows that aren’t part of the main piece, but just contain the note(s) and notations you want to clarify in your front matter, can be a good way to go about this. Here’s a video that demonstrates the principle.

If you add extra flows for this purpose, then make sure you remove them from the master page frame chain (so they aren’t also shown at the end of the layout, after the “proper flow(s)”).

Thanks for that. I’ll check out your suggestion.

i recently did this fully in dorico. i am quite happy with it :slight_smile: It is amazing, on what is possible in Dorico. All my other colleagues are usually doing this stuff in word and later combine the PDFs…


Thanks Lillie and Sascha.

Lillie - I tried your suggestion but the frame in front matter was including the whole of the main flow. Do you mean that I should create a flow for each bit of the performing instructions (each containing a fragment or one note only) and link them to the frames in front matter? I’m a bit confused.

Sascha - how did you manage to link just one not to the frame in the index?

Yes, I created a single flow for each frame in the index.
You might think it’s a little tedious, but I usually use a separate layout where I only have the preface flows active and edit them in one go.
After that, it’s creating layout frames and selecting the appropriate flow.

Sascha, this looks beautiful! Is the font the Dorico default one?

Yes Peter exactly - as Sascha said, you can have as many flows as you like, as long or short as needed. You can either have a separate flow for each notation and show each one in a separate music frame, or (depending on how you like to display your notation information) I recently added a single extra flow with 7 or so quarter notes, each with one of the used noteheads/added notations, then used lyrics to number underneath “1. 2. 3.” etc then had a numbered list underneath clarifying each notation. That was useful in that piece because it wasn’t very complicated, and it fit in more neatly with the rest of the information on the page.

It would be nice if we could set from and to a bar number of a flow.
Ex. Flow 3, from 27 to 28.

Jesper

Thank you!
The music font is indeed Bravura, the text font is Adobe Garamond IIRC.

I agree, that might be helpful in some cases.
On the other hand, IIRC, it’s not possible then to for example change the staff size (via right click > staff size) without also affecting the staff size of the “original” full music frame.

This seems logical, as frames are just the “window” to whatever underlying flow, which actually stores all the information. (I think?)

Sascha, you’d be able to do it in those circumstances using a global space size change attached to a system or frame break at the start of the displayed part of the flow, since those are frame-specific. However, it’s quite tricky to display only part of a flow in that way; we’d like to add this feature but our initial investigations show that it won’t be a quick job.

Thanks Daniel.

Jesper