Hi,
I have finished a couple of chamber music pieces with Dorico, so time to get messy…
I’m now doing some short sketches, but the final piece will be roughly half an hour.
I will be composing a piece for orchestra, but with a twist. In some sections the orchestra functions totally normally, but in other sections, the orchestra is divided into six or seven chamber music groups with up to 7 players each. They have each their own meter and possibly tempi (writing things in different meters seems to be the easiest part in Dorico, playback is not relevant and most of the time it is not very important that the notes align perfectly, but even even this should be somewhat doable). I don’t know the number sequences in the final piece.
-In normal sections, I will write the score in a normal manner, add a bit more cues to the parts, because the piece is played without a conductor.
-In the other chamber music sections I would like the score to be in a different order. The parts should have different cues, probably not the full chamber ensemble.
What would be the easiest way to accomplish this? I’m not experienced using Dorico for parts or many instruments.
Plan 1. I do it all in one project. Ordinary sections are easy. The chamber sections have their own flows and I have a new layout. I used layout options to change the order and grouping of the instruments. When I’m ready, I will print normal flows using normal layout and chamber flows using chamber layout and edit it all together (adding some extra pages here and there to keep the page numbers logical). The parts should be relatively easy. I will need to think the cues part by part.
-I felt a bit uncertain about using extremely different divisions: normal sections have normal or modest divisions, the chamber sections have all the time only 8 solo violins in the weird groups. The divisions seems smooth, but do you think it would be up to all this jumping? Intuitively I did Violin I and Violin II and then Violins 1 - 8, but that might make parts messy. Playback not important.
-Other huge problems that concerning the different instrumentations, that I didn’t think of?
Plan 2. I just write these as two completely different files and then edit everything together in the end. A lot of messy page numbers.
Plan 3. Something different.
Bonus question: I have created new groups (of a sort) by changing the order of instruments in the options and then in engrave the brackets. Is there a way to add names to this kinds of groups? If I only do it once or twice, it might be easier to do as texts that I move in engrave.
And sure, I know that this is a horrible idea in so many ways.