Identifying individual copyists from their notational quirks and handwriting is one of the musicological tools used working with “old” (as in centuries old) manuscripts. I suppose it’s not too surprising the same thing was happening in the last century, before notation apps smoothed out the differences!
It’s a question I’m pondering all the time - who has done what? The Piano Reduction Arranger, The Editor, The Printer? It’s possible to see recurring habits and idiosyncrasies. All I have is the end result so there a fair bit of detective work involved. Fun, though…
I’m writing for double choir.
Do I get it right that there is now way (except with a workaround - inputting text) that my ritardando is shown for both choirs?
I think I did the right thing in layout options:
Yes, I think that’s correct. You could employ a workaround such as using a different type of instrument for the second choir, but you will still have to use a regular tenor for the tenor in the second choir, which means you’ll need to also use a custom bracket group for the second choir.
Thanx Daniel.
My workaround now is the following:
- create a second ‘rit’ some bars before → suppress playback → drag it to the desired position in engrave mode
works perfectly
Thanx a lot and best wishes for 2020 for the whole team !
May I also suggest using actual singers or removing any manual staff line changes. As it is now your barlines intersect you’re text. They should not be connected.
Apologies for raising this one again - this is one of those repetitive tasks where an option to re-position would be really useful.
As I’ve said before, most of the music I work with is early 20th Century Songwiter and Broadway Vocal/Piano. The convention here is to place Immediate Tempo changes above the Vocal staff (or above the Piano Staves if the Vocal line is hidden) in a Bold font (less than 5% are Italic) and Gradual Tempo changes between the Piano staves (95%+ are italic). I’m not saying it’s the correct way to do it but I am saying this is the way that school did it. En masse. Showboat, Porgy - all the way through to The Sound Of Music*. And, needless to say, you’re dealing with a genre littered with songwriters who didn’t think twice before reaching for a ritardando…
There is a further complication. They also view a tempo as the closing part of a Gradual Tempo statement and not an Immediate Tempo marking - so that also went between the staves.
Of course its possible to work around this (I’ve been doing so for years) but it is a chore with hiding, Shift-X and repositioning in Engraving all coming into play. As there is no above/below correction function that last bit also involves dealing with staff spacings.
I appreciate the team at Dorico will amost certainly want to stick with Gould and co on this rather than introduce more flexibility. However, rather than relaxing rules, there may be a way around it. If one can hide gradual tempo markings without resorting to Color/Opacity and be able to define text styles where the text is placed between a Grand Staff - problem solved.
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- For the sake of accuracy, I did find one example in my library that didn’t follow this convention: Loesser’s “How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying” (1961)
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You can flip Shift-X text items after the fact. I wonder if it might also be simpler to draw your rits in Play mode, rather than adding and hiding them in Write mode.
Thanks Leo - that’s really useful. I’ve always looked at editing rits in Play Mode as a playback improvement function but you’re absolutely right - there’s no reason why it can’t be done there rather than in Play Mode, and the relevant text added back in Write Mode afterwards. I’ll try that approach for a while …