in this first line, I understand that Dorico is treating the multirest as a single empty bar (ish, but the result is note spacing that is pretty difficult to read (as indicated by the system percentage on the right as well).
is there a way to prioritize note spacing over rests? It seems to me that making the multirest wider has absolutely no impact on readability, whereas very widely spaced notes do.
dorico tries to keep systems below the max percentage automatically, but is it possible for it to try to keep systems above the minimum automatically? eg just “keep system percentage in the green zone”
even nudging this bar manually to just inside the “green zone” improves it to my eyes:
If you know you’re often or usually going to be fixing or contriving the casting off such that you will have four bars per system, you might consider tweaking the settings on the Rests page of Engraving Options such that Dorico will try to make multi-bar rests wider.
It would be tricky for Dorico to do exactly what you describe here, though I agree that in principle it would be neat if, when Dorico has to justify a system horizontally because it is under-filled, it could prefer to add extra space to multi-bar rests rather than to “regular” bars.
That’s fair! I’ll have a go playing with some of those settings.
But yeah, I agree, from a very big picture standpoint it’s really the horizontal spacing of notes that I’d like automatically adjusted without much compromise - rests I could take or leave.
@John_Ruggero
This job requires named sections on line breaks (and the genre in general is heavily biased towards it). I imagine this kind of thing comes up a lot in musical theatre as well.
I disagree that no spacing will look good - I think the wide multirest looks totally fine and doesn’t impede the readabilityof the musical content at all (whereas the default spacing does quite badly).
I think in the example here an even higher value would be better, but I seem to recall I settled on that setting as a default as it looked better in systems with other configurations. It’s been a while since I revisited that setting, but in any case you likely will not want to leave it at the factory default.
Sorry, a little more. I worked for L. Bernstein’s (Barber’s, Menotti’s, Ginestera’s etc.) copyist many years ago. He adhered to the style one sees in the example below. No piece started without a cue, and no entrance after more than 6 or so measures without a cue. I have a feeling that was somewhat unheard of among most copyists, but boy did the players like his parts, and composers, the results.
I know we’ve talked about this before, but players often dislike cues that extend into the bar of entry unless absolutely required for the cue to be clear. It just makes it too easy to be following along with the cue and then suddenly be unprepared for the entrance. Most texts advise against that practice. Here’s Gould pg 571:
this is all fair, and works very well in the classical world! but we’re talking about very different genres here — I’m working in complex modern cuban music where the players often get 0 to 2 rehearsals. A very different set of considerations!
All the more reason (I’d have thought) to have lots of cues.
I do quite a lot of modern chamber music and we find it useful to have lot of information about what the others are (supposed to be) playing. Sometimes simple cues, other times a complete stave of cues.
We did the same cuing in all genres, from jingles to operas and for the same reason: rehearsal time is very limited and very expensive, especially for the large stage works in which we specialized.
Regarding cuing entrances. A. A. would have probably said that it was always “important to follow a cue right up to an entry” to lead the player into the entrance smoothly, rather than to stop abruptly in the middle of a phrase, which was something he totally ruled out.
Yep, in Cuban music it’s absolutely essential that the layout follows the clave pattern for any tune in clave. I’m guessing your example is 2+3 there at bar 11. In all the groups I’ve played and recorded with in that style, the copyist always makes the layout match the clave phrasing. As the clave remains constant, if the phrasing flips to the other side, the layout absolutely needs to reflect that, as with the 3 and 5 bar system layouts below:
This is true - ish. In cuban music there are quite a lot of clave “jumps” where the clave doesn’t remain constant (they don’t treat it as a fundamentalist rule the way many north americans interpret it).
Plus, the brass players don’t need to know what the clave underlying the phrase is in order to play it correctly (though most of them feel it reflexively anyway)
In this case it’s more about ease of rehearsal: if all the named sections are in the same place it’s quicker to jump around visually when rehearsing small chunks of music.
In your example, I don’t thik the arranger is paying any attention to which side of the clave is at the start of the system honestly.
the 5-bar system is functionally starting with a 4th repeat ending (which should just be notated that way IMO), and would actually be better placed on the previous line
the 3-bar system is so the next named section can appear at the start of the line, which happens to indicate a clave change here, but doesn’t have to.
I other words, I think dividing systems by phrasing makes great sense, but it’s completely independant of clave.
I actually agree with you on that one. I would have been inclined to place it on the prior system too, I’m just assuming that the arranger (Jose Madeira, conga player with Tito Puente for 30+ years) had the “Mambo” indication in that bar, so Omar put it there so it would be obvious to find when Joe gave a cue. Sometimes the cues are 4 bars and sometimes 3 depending on where we are in the form and which side of the clave, so I guess he decided it was probably better to stick with where Joe had it.
I picked Complicación as an example just because I knew it had a zillion shifts where the phrasing goes to the other side, but probably have dozens of alto parts that Omar copied in sent to me in various emails. Omar Castaños was THE copyist in the NYC Latin Jazz / Salsa scene for decades. I guess I was sort of the equivalent in the NYC jazz scene, but we were friendly and sometimes threw each other work, even though he didn’t want me moving in on his turf, LOL! I played in a lot of Latin bands back then (still do quite a bit) so probably played 100s of charts Omar copied. We had a lot of stylistic differences in our copywork, but he always laid out his parts exceptionally clearly, taking into account the form and clave structure, and it made it easy to locate any Moñas or Montunos when the bandleader would be start cueing things on the gig. RIP Omar.
Aha! I had missed the details of this when I read it before - I think this basically solves it! Will have to test a few more things, but this seems to work.
FWIW Daniel, it seems that Dorico actually does prioritize spacing of notation vs multibar rests — you just have to allow it to make multibar rests wider in Engraving Options!
EDIT: it does seem like this only works with leading multibar rests though, not trailing (see below)