Hi,
I would like to connect several staves with a single stem, like in this example:
What I did, in Dorico 5.1.30, was to hide all the stems from the notes in the staves after the top one, and then use a vertical line to extend the stem of the top note.
It works, but it can be scrambled when changing something somewhere.
Paolo
What happens if you start with all the notes as one chord in the top staff, select the lowest note, and then press M a bunch of times until the note is on the bottom staff, and so onā¦?
Can this be done? Tied would be another issueā¦
Just a thought.
This works if all the staves are part of the same instrument. If the instruments are different it doesnāt.
Paolo
Makes sense
It should be possible to raid the stem of the lowest staff in engrave mode high enough to cover all staves, I think?
Not that I could find. Extending it also changes the inter-staves spacing. Unless there is some property to switch somewhere, but Iāve not found it.
Paolo
Perhaps this one:
Layout Options>Vertical Spacing>Minimum Gaps
and there untick: Automatically resolve ā¦
It works, thank you!
Now the question: disabling it may cause issues? I would guess that it would require some more care when revising the position of dynamics and text elements. But these would have to be done in any case.
Incidentally: I might even prefer to keep it disabled, and be sure the spacing between staves is kept always even.
Paolo
Eh, it does. Itās incredible how many complicate spacing issues it can solve transparently.
Paolo
Sorry to be the grumpy one, but why on earth would you want this? What special musical information does it provide? If I read a score where everybody has the same rhythm, I really can get it without everybody having their stems connectedā¦ Sorry (again), but itās silly.
+1
I also noticed the dynamics and the tenuto marking only on the bottom note. Does this mean the other instruments mimic the bottom one? This only makes the notation more confusing and ambiguous, definetely not the purpose of notation.
The main reason may be that the score Iām examining by copying is made this way.
Itās part of a score opposing extreme precision to controlled randomness. This kind of notation gives no chance to doubt: all instruments are perfectly synchronous. They are not just playing at the same time. They are the same organism playing the same chord.
The score contains groups of 11 instruments acting together. By having them joined together, the conductor can clearly see how they must be treated as monolithic groups, and not as instruments who happen to play together at a certain moment.
Paolo
I have seen this kind of stemming in āGembaku ShÅkeiā by Hikaru Hayashi ā which is a cappella choral music, so everybody reads the same score. He also used time-proportional note spacing. That score was inscrutable enough that the choir director had those two movements recopied into standard notation for our performance.
I understand the ensemble information the stemming conveys, but is it really more useful for a conductor? It seems like an organizational tool for the composer and a convenient shorthand for hand copyists. The players, with their separate parts, donāt see it at all. Not every innovative notation in hand-copied scores of the 20th century is actually an improvement over standard notation.
(ā¦)same organism playing the same chord
This has been used for centuries, not new. All it takes is reading the passage one time to see itās an homorhythmic texture, the note and stem alignment gives it away without being all over the place. Probably having a symbol that ensures itās homorhythmic could do.
However, your suggestion might be useful for literal copying I guess, even though it is bizarre.
Thatās what I call a sign of a bad music sheet, canāt imagine the waste of time and money 
As a comparison, this is a similar passage before joining the stems:
What I find is that this is less icastic, less immediately recognizable as the intended gesture. There is still too much individuality in the parts. And when put in the general texture, with chords interconnecting in a ~70 staves score, I suspect the readability would get lost. The score is not only a set of instructions, but also an evocative work of visual art per se.
I understand this may require some preliminary time to decipher the notation, but this is also the reason why there are specialists mostly devoted to this music. I donāt know where you are based, but I feel this very much an European thing. There is a strong separation, here, between those who refuse this music, and those who specialize on it. Iām still thinking to a semi-pro choir refusing even Arvo PƤrt, because his writing was considered too hard to read.
Those who specialize on this kind of music are actually excited by new ways of writing. Sometimes they also suggest new ways of notating new techniques. During the Eighties and Nineties Stefano Scodanibbio and others where talking about a āRinascimento strumentaleā, that may sound something like āmusical performance Renaissanceā. The best virtuosos had discovered the importance of their contribution to modern music, and pretended from the composers music that few could read, because tailored on them.
This piece by Donatoni has been first performed by the Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester Kƶln, and has been later performed by orchestras of this level. Reading it was for sure not a real problem.
Paolo
Thanks for the further info on practices and alliances. When using these stems you must need a separate score from which to generate proper parts, yes? The only way Dorico could handle this automatically would be a whole new functionality.
I confirm. The workaround to make the āextendedā chords doesnāt translate well in the parts. Maybe with a dedicated function for these chords it would make things easierā¦
Paolo
A beautiful example by Saarihao (āDu cristalā¦ā), where fluid chaos is juxtaposed to perfect synchronism:
What I notice about it is that I have to look all the way to the bottom of the system (or group) to find the beams, and thus the rhythm. As far away from the tempo markings and meters as possible. I know Iām just not used to it, but I think standard stems and beams all perfectly lined up convey the same information!
I find in some āmodernā music there is a very oldfashioned attitude. The composer is sort of almighty creative head with lots of ideas he puts down on paper, but the actual performers are no self confident artists, but stupid instrumentalists or singers, who have to be told, how to actually perform the music.
Why make it difficult for the performers? what kind of attitude is this?
