Usually at the top, often more than one vocal part to each line if placed on an ‘orchestral’ score. The vocal work is usually done with a vocal/piano score.
IME the vocal/piano score is often annotated with instrumental cues so it can be used to conduct from even with orchestra.
Derek to answer your question, usually at the top. But I’ve worked on theater scores where the vocals (and dialogue) are all in the middle in “proper” score order. Honestly it depends on the show, and/or the preferences of the composer, the orchestrator or the conductor.
teacue, I agree with the problem of not having flexibility to create a definable system text that appears in specific places in specific parts and/or scores. Finale achieves this (fairly well) with “Score Lists” in the expressions tool. Something akin to that in Dorico would be helpful for sure, particularly for this specific case of putting dialogue where it needs to go.
For theatre scores, my singers are in the middle, just above the piano. BTW, I’m dealing with this issue of dialogue/direction cues as well. In my current project I chose to use system text for general stage cues - direction/movement/action – and plain text for dialogue, placed directly in the staff of the character whom is speaking. Additionally, I have set up a “custom score” layout, which contains just the speaking/singing characters, chorus, and piano. In this mini score; the system text appears once at that the top of the system, and dialogue appears as it comes up, at the appropriate time on the appropriate character’s staff. This particular layout is set up to “hide empty staves” so if a character does not speak or sing in the flow, their staff is not included for that flow. Dorico has made this way of working really quite elegant and I’m finding this to be the best solution for me for now. I’m new to Dorico too, so I’m sure there are better solutions.
What an interesting idea. I could see this technique being useful in many different scenarios. (Difficult text-dense Psalm settings for instance.)
Just want to +1 the request for a good way of inserting cues in a score (for instance vocal score) and not on parts.
One more thing about this necessity of a System Text that would be ignored in parts: we can hide the text in parts with the 0% opacity trick, but what I find the worst is that multi-bar rests are split where a system text has been entered. I’m not aware of any workaround.
In the next update, system text that is at the same rhythmic position as the start of the bar will not prevent the following bar from being consolidated into a multi-bar rest, though it will still be split at that barline.