Time signatures with half bars rules don't seem to be applying to 2/2

Dorico
#1

I’ve been noticing that when entering notes in 2/2, my preferences for note groupings in time signatures with half bars aren’t being followed. I’ll try to add a dotted half note to the start of the bar and Dorico turns it into a half note tied to a quarter note. The preferences work totally fine in 4/4. I’m guessing this may be because Dorico is treating 2/2 bars as a different category, but I can’t seem to set any preferences whatsoever for them (I may be missing the option somewhere). I’m hoping they can either be included in the category of “time signatures with half bars” or be given their own preferences. Or hopefully there is a way to adjust them somewhere already.

I should mention that I am running 1.2 – my apologies if this has been addressed in later updates! I did check through the documentation and did not find it addressed in any of the updates, but it’s certainly possible I missed it in there.

#2

Dorico doesn’t think of 2/2 as a time signature with a half-bar, so that would explain it. It sounds like you’d like 2/2 to be treated as if it were 4/4, in which case I suggest you add a 4/4 time signature in the second bar of your piece, and use the ‘Hide time signature’ property to hide it; you’ll then need to fix up only the first bar of the flow using Force Duration if necessary.

#3

Thank you, Daniel! That will work for me.

I’m definitely curious about the reasoning for 2/2 not being considered a meter with half-bars (I would think they’d be considered half bars where each half only has one larger beat), but this solution fixes the behavior! Though I do worry a little that there may be other properties about 2/2 that are not related to whether it’s a half-bar meter that could be affected.

#4

Me too. I fall into this trap more than any other - forgetting to force duration for a dotted half note at the start of a bar in cut time.

#5

I don’t know how modern composers use 2/2 (in fact I can’t think of any examples where they do) but historically, 2/2 or cut-time was beamed the same way as 4/4.

I challenge anyone to find a single published example of beaming of eight 16th-notes together in 2/2, to justify the Dorico default.