Dorico community,
Is it possible to create non-traditional notation like the Schwantner examples I posted here? There are three examples from J. Schwantner’s Sparrows written in 1979. Much of Schwantner’s music during this period is aleatoric and the notation is somewhat non traditional. Can I use Dorico produce such scores and write in this kind of genre? Does Dorico have the capacity to delineate this kind of music? If so, do any of you have ideas, tips or tricks to notate music like this? Do you know of any helpful procedures etc. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks
Whilst it is possible using quite a few workarounds, some aspects are not natively supported yet, but very much on the teams radar.
Namely Cut Away Scores and Aleatoric Boxes Notation. If you search for those terms you find a few threads with aforementioned workarounds, but possibly some other users will chime in as well.
This looks like cut-out scores, which is clearly something Dorico cannot do. You can fake it with some effort, but honestly, I would wait until this is implemented. Don’t ask fish to climb up trees, you’ll be disappointed
It’s worth noting that cut-out scores saw their heyday in the period just before notation software hit the market (1955 to say, 1985). I bet that we’d see a lot more of them (and I frankly would prefer to use cut-out scores in a lot of projects) if it were supported. You don’t see them any more precisely because software companies think they aren’t necessary to support, and composers in turn, don’t have the time to ‘fake it’. We are swimming upstream.
It’s not a case of asking fish to climb trees, but rather, the unavailability of this feature dictating the perceived need for it. No one does them because it’s too hard and we have other fish to fry (the ones not climbing trees). It’s true, cut-out scores don’t add much except better clarity and a better representation in scores of how many are playing at any moment. They are not ‘needed’, per se, any more than different musical fonts or multiple ways of indicating accents/pedal markings/polyrhythms, etc. . I hope that some day we’ll see them; I’ve been asking for them for the last 2 or 3 versions or so and I don’t even know if they are on any future feature list. They are a feature that only ‘art’ music composers would ask for, and sadly, (especially now, with the need to support the Finale Diaspora), we are decidedly a small constituency, compared to the folks who need chord symbols, medieval note styles, figured bass, complex lyric support, etc.
Full disclosure: I studied composition with Joe Schwantner in the 1980’s and saw his drafting table setup in his home office for making his scores. It was pretty impressive.
AFAIK the Team has clearly expressed they plan to implement it when they can.
I can’t say more, as a simple user I don’t have any more information that what you could find reading this forum. I just want to save you some time!
Are you carping on about them floundering? I’d say it’s a fluke.
I’m waiting for the advice they give you to apply them here in a post I’ll do about it
This is not the answer to your question re Dorico, and I’ll probably get booted out for saying this, but Lilypond can do all this just fine. Just letting you know that there are notation programs capable of this.
Why would you get booted out? Lilypond is a very capable app (I’m a LaTeX user and love its philosophy), it is good people know about it. MuseScore Studio is not the only free app out there, and I certainly wouldn’t try cut-out scores in MS!