Hi, I’ve been working on a chorale-symphonic project for a while and now I’m confronted with string divisi challenges.
The project is my master thesis which I wrote years ago when I only had pencil and paper to score.
Now having input all the parts in its original form on a Dórico project file, I’m confronted with how to create the conductor and individual parts applying divisi for the strings.
Originally I wrote all string parts as solo which gives me 14 +14 violins, 10 violas, 8 cellos & 6 double bass.
I guess my questions would be how to proceed now, so the conductor score isn’t really huge, and at the same time have the individual part score for each string player. I do have them do many parts as solo vs tutti.
Sorry for the possibly naive question, but I never really got a chance to even talk to any conductor nor string players to know what typical scores performers tend to get in such large orchestras.
Hope some of this makes sense. In any case, I’m open to any insight and suggestions for this challenge.
Thank you for your time & consideration.
just for clarity. you’ve written 52 different solo parts.? or violin 1 divisi, (a2,3…). violin 2 divisi. etc. typically string sections divide by inside and outside players. and some scores specify how big the section is ie. 14 1sts, 14 2nds…
i would not put more than 2 voices on one staff for the part. you can have 2 or more staves in your part layout. using a combination of voices and divisi. (added staves) you can also condense that to 3-4 voices for the score. but if there’s a lot of voice crossing it could be difficult to read.
Hi Tom. Thanks for replying. When I composed/wrote this piece, I approached it as a huge group of solo players, hence I’ve treated most of the sections as solo players performing different parts. The max solo simultaneous parts in the string section are 50 players. The whole piece has a full section of Woodwinds, Brass, 8 percussionists plus piano, 2 harps and two 20 person mixed choirs.
At some parts of the piece there are 53 staves on the page.
Having input all parts as solo players and playing around with the condensing, I’m getting between 2 and 3 players per staff, depending on what is written.
I think my main concern is for the conductor score, and how to approach this so when different players are not playing, that their staves are omitted in order to make the score less crowded visually.
Does this make sense? There are few small voice crossings between the string parts.
Normally, in conventional (say ‘late 19th-century style’) orchestral settings, strings are considered collective sections, that may eventually divide into several subsections or even individuals. But your approach, starting with quite a lot of individual players, may be viable in this case. There are examples out there of pieces with all solo strings notated on their own staff (Strauss, Penderecki). If your piece also has substantial passages with unison/tutti (like all first violins playing the same line), then you might ocnsider creating a separate player for that, instead of relying on the cumbersome condensing of all individuals. Add this tutti staff to all individual part layouts, and apply clever hiding of empty solo and tutti staves at system breaks. No doubt it’ll be a lot of work anyway to create all those separate parts. Or maybe you were already planning to create more integrated parts, say, one per desk?
Dorico condensing changes allows you to have one staff for e.g. the cello section for unison or even simple divisi sections like 3 voice chords and split into two or more cello section staffs when there are many voices. You often see this ‘complexity based’ layout in the John Williams singnature edition conductor scores.