Romanos401
I’ve just looked at one or two study scores of pieces with orchestra, and they all show only two staves. Not much help. But I’ve also looked at “Music Notation” by Gardner Reed (Gollancz, 1974) which acknowledges both conventions for dealing with barlines, but says that putting the barline joining the pedal stave with the manual staves is “not recommended”. As the book predates most - all? -notation programmes, you can’t blame them for the confusion!
I don’t actually recall often seeing barlines joining all three staves, except in 19th century editions of organ music by Reubke (German publisher) and Vierne (French publisher) - so maybe that is/was a Continental practice (but not universally used even there).
Michael, you could be on to something. The photo I attached a little while ago was a French romantic piece by a French publisher. That said, I’m going to agree with Thomas that at least in cases where there are other instruments involved, it might be better to join them. As I look at my Franck example it really does look like a voice, with a piano in the middle, and then perhaps a cello part beneath; not a conventional setup, but the eye is easily tricked. I’m glad to learn about the Reed (I have that laying around somewhere…) and that there at least is the acknowledgment of both conventions. This might be my “get out of jail free card” for making the discretionary decision to combine them in this case and not in others.
(I’ll also add that the trick now will be if Dorico will allow, in future, for the BARLINES to be disconnected but the repeats to span all 3 staves. Currently it is all or nothing.)
In most cases you have only few repeat barlines. So you could have “disconnected” als default and join the repeat barlines in properties panel by hand.
I just watched some “older” editions of organ music that were published by Butz Musikverlag, Bonn, Germany . As far as I know, the music engraving was done on an Atari computer (I asume with Notator SL): All barlines (not only the repeat barlines) are joined.
In the year 1999 someone else and I started engraving for Butz Musikverlag with Finale and Sibelius. From that time on only the two upper staves have joined (repeat and normal) barlines. Another evidence that joining/disconnecting depends on the software.
I very much doubt we will add the capability to make repeat barlines join different staves than normal barlines. Special barlines – whether double, repeat, or final – should use the same barline joins as normal, unadorned barlines.
Unfortunately not, Thomas, because it will then change all the barlines as well. As I said above, it’s all or nothing. For organ solo it’s fine the default way; the only thing that caught my eye was once I had two other staves with the organ and I realized the pedal part blended right in.
I know! It’s the same for me. Clearly I’ve played both and never thought much of it. Then all of the sudden when I was forced to make an explicit decision about it I started wondering. There are so many aspects of music I’d never deeply pondered until I started engraving things myself. I also find loads of mistakes in old editions that I engrave too. It’s almost comical. I love finding the same material, pages later, notated differently than before, or measures that don’t have the correct number of beats… etc. You can also find times when the engraver made a mistake, and you know they knew, because they did something funny to mitigate the error without wanting to redo the whole plate. It really is fascinating.
Isn’t this what you wanted to achieve? The checked option in properties panel “Taktstrich verbindet alle Systeme” must be something like “Barline joins all staves” in English.
EDIT: Ah, I just realized my misunderstanding: This only works for organ solo but not, when there’s a solo instrument above.
There need to be some different ways of displaying how the 3-part organ grand staff shows. The default is good for pure organ music, but if you put this in an ensemble score, you get one staff that has no label and is not bracketed to anything else, so there is no way for the reader to tell what it represents. It is possible to re-do the bracket so it covers all three staves, and also re-do the barline joins, but then you have the instrument name at an odd level, and there is no way to consistently centralise it on the 3-part grand staff.
David, interestingly enough if you look at most modern organ music there is only a normal grand staff with an extra stave beneath, which, more often than not, does not have connected barlines to the grand staff (except at the very beginning of each stave). You can make the manual bracket change if desired already to put all three under the curly brace (which runs the risk of being confusing for those times when you need three staves for manuals).
I think the bigger issue is the fact that the pedal stave is not calculated in the spacing algorithms as belonging to the manuals, so the auto justify settings really muck things up sometimes. I think there needs to be a special setting in the vertical settings pane of the layout options dialogue just for organ to choose the desired distance between manuals and between manuals and pedal (which is often narrower).
Would this include changing Midi channels for a given stave? i.e. top stave becomes the swell or solo manual, but then changes back a few measures later to the great. I’m totally new to Dorico, but as an organist/composer it’s a very necessary capability. btw: Dorico is totally amazing!!!
Thanks.
That’s great news, thanks for letting me know. I’m assuming channels can be changed from one voice to another at any point along the score, not simply set at the beginning and no place else?
SInce the number of voices is unlimited, you will possibly find it easier to fix a channels to each voice and then substitute the voices where you need them to get the correct “stops.”
