Thanks to everyone for their advice! I tried out some of your ideas…
This is a clever idea. This works nicely at the start of the score. However, it messes things up if I want to create a divisi again later in the piece. Here’s what happens:
- In Setup mode, create a single section player and choose the Soprano instrument.
- In Write mode, create a divisi at the start.
- Add a section division.
- Delete the second instrument just created (‘2’).
- Rename the only remaining instrument from ‘1’ to ‘S.A.’ with a carriage return in the middle.
- Now, later in the same score, create a new divisi on the soprano line (now called ‘S.A.’). That divisi doesn’t work as expected: although the section divisions are correctly labelled ‘S.’ and ‘A.’ in the divisi dialogue, they are incorrectly labelled ‘S.’ and ‘1 + Sopranos’ (?!) in the score. Also, the normal functionality of the divisi feature whereby material before the divisi is recreated on both staves earlier in the same system fails.
I hesitate to say that this is a bug, since it was caused by a weird workaround in the first place, and also because I don’t really understand what is going on here. But it certainly isn’t expected behaviour.
you can easily select the first note or rest in the system and add the clef you want. It won’t appear as a clef change then.
It does appear as a clef change for me, and I can’t find a way to hide it.
For me it does appear above, or rather, as the topmost staff in the divisi. Did you really create a soloist, not another section in the divisi dialog?
You’re right, it does appear above. Sorry. I was confused by the fact that the solo line inherits the musical material from the top line of the sopranos before the divisi:
This behaviour confuses me a little. Suppose I have a single soprano line which continues through the piece, then I want to add a soloist at a certain point with an additional line of music. The sequence I would expect is:
- Create divisi in soprano staff and add soloist. Soloist staff appears above soprano staff, empty.
- Input soloist’s music into soloist staff.
Whereas the actual sequence is:
- Create divisi in soprano staff and add soloist. Soprano staff is changed into soloist, inheriting its existing music, and additional soprano staff appears below, empty.
- Move all music from soloist staff to soprano staff below for duration of divisi.
- Input soloist’s music into soloist staff.
The result in galley view is this:
And of course this comes with its own disadvantages, such as the fact that selecting all music on the top staff (for copying etc) gives me a mixture of the soloist’s music and the section’s music.
I think lyrics are attached to rhythmic positions on a staff, not to notes or voices. Just select a note in the voice you want input lyrics for and type away. Later you can always select indivdual lyrics and move them above the staff via the properties panel.
This works perfectly. Thanks!
I think your best bet would be four players plus the Solo singer. You can hide empty staves (Layout Options) and with the workaround I described for the staff labels you can label the staves on those systems where there are ‘condensed’ staves individually as needed.
Yep, this looks like the best method, using forced system breaks. Ah well. It’s a perfectly livable method, I’ve been using it for 15 years on Sibelius… 