Hi Daniel,
Thank you for your welcome.
Sorry for not answering yet. I did’t receive a notification of all the answer.
Generally, in contemporary music a lot of situations ask for a dynamic change in staff lines number in one instrument staff. For example changing from a “pitched behavior” to an “unhitched behavior”. Or to play in a specific range giving the shape of the gesture (because in these cases it’s simply useless to indicate pitches).
Some examples: in strings you can use a 5 lines staff to write ordinary notes, then you can use a 1-line staff for other playing techniques like playing on the bridge, or other kind of noisy techniques.
Contemporary music players are used to these changes (at least in Europe) and I find them “functional” because they help instrumentalist when the music asks for noisy techniques or to change their normal attitude.
Lachenmann in several occasions draws two widely spaced lines to indicate a zone of the instrument or a register; then he writes what to do inside this register.
I’m convinced, also, that for percussion music this function could help.
In the case of Berio’s Sequenza III, but also for many other works for voice (nowadays classics of vocal literature: Sinfonia, Laborintus II, etc) the number of lines are interpreted like that:
- 1 line when the singer has to speak;
- 3 lines when the singer has to sing following an intonation profile but notes can be approximate (the three lines indicate three registers);
- 5 lines when the singer has to sing with precise intervallar relations.
(I attach the instructions from the score of Berio)
There are other composers using similar techniques, Ligeti in Aventures and Nouvelles adventures, etc. and not only in vocal music.
I don’t want to make a list of all that, but I can send you some material, explaining or discussing some functionalities.
I saw that now In Dorico you can easily hide staves (also in partial measures), changing the number of staff lines could be something similar.
Of course, these changes would create a problem for playback. In general, I think that you have two kind of composers: some using Dorico mainly as a notation program and others using it to listen to everything.
Perhaps, the ones desiring listening to all would like to have the possibility to edit the playback of these “different staff styles”.
I appreciate so much the overall organization of Dorico and how you designed it. It’s really functional. On the other hand, it’s very difficult to incorporate in one notation software all the desiderata of the musical community. As always in these cases there isn’t an unique way to do things.
You’ve done a huge step forward in Dorico personalization, so that every user can format a score following his/her personal writing techniques.
I think that if Dorico will add more personalization functions like that, it would be really THE notation software of nowadays.
Thank for your time
cheers
Lorenzo
