Hello,
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I can’t seem to figure out how to add V.S. (volti subito) for an unusually quick page turn in a part. When I add the text to the bar with Ctrl-X, it ends up appearing in the score as well. I searched through the forum and can’t find anything - any ideas?
Thanks.
Since the instruction is layout-specific, you’ll want to add a text frame to the page, in Engrave mode.
It would be great if Dorico could do this automatically.
It might be nice for some better handling of this, but I don’t know if I necessarily want it automatically.
I’ve noticed that there are two different meanings of V.S.: the “classical” meaning is to indicate an unusually fast page turn - i.e. there is less than a bar of rest on the next page before you play, so turn quick and prepare to enter right away. In commercial scoring it appears to merely mean “turn the page” and it seems basically every page turn is indicated such, regardless of how quickly it needs to be performed. If it were automated it might have to be able to differentiate between the two meanings to generate it in an appropriate way, and there should still be a way of overriding it in case it doesn’t make the right decision automatically.
That’s interesting — I didn’t know about the “commercial” use of V.S. — If it’s put at the bottom of every page, why put it at all?
Regardless, I could imagine a solution to this with a setting like “minimum number of empty bars needed at top of following page to show V.S.” — obviously someone could think of a better wording than that…
it’s not always simply a measure of bars… it’s time.
I can make a 2 bar page turn at adagio, but not at allegro.
you would also have to factor in if there is an instrument or location change involved.
It can also handy to have a free floating multi bar rest below (outside) the score with, for example, 4 indicated to show that after the page turn there is a four bar rest
I wondered this myself, but as far as I can determine, a quick turn where they would have to play immediately would simply never happen, you would always create the part so that the page turn does not need to be taken quickly, that is the justification. The V.S. then becomes a precautionary indicator that reminds the performer “there is another page, the piece doesn’t end here”, since the thick bar line that you normally find at the end of a piece doesn’t always appear where you might expect in commercial scoring. If you are paying a 100-piece orchestra and the lead trumpet thinks they are done and fails to turn the page and misses a solo entry, thereby screwing up your recording, it wastes money. Probably they aren’t going to mess it up, but if they are especially sleepy on one day, even if they are normally right on the ball, it can happen. The commercial train of thought seems to be to pretend that the weird one-off mistake can occur at any point and write indications defensively based upon that.
I only found out about this commercial meaning as the TA for an orchestration course where I had to grade the parts, and the example parts of the teacher had a V.S. indication with 4 bars rest at the beginning of the following page (same tempo, < 120bpm, etc). I knew something was off vs. the classical meaning since they had several seconds to take the page turn, pretty leisurely. This was basically confirmed by the commercial copyist manual “The Art of Music Copying” by Clinton Roemer, and I further confirmed this “commercial” meaning with the instructor.
There’s nothing new under the sun. 18th-century copyists did the same as the “commercial” version, but with less ink: they put “Fine” at the end of the last page where you didn’t need to turn over. If even “Fine” was too much to write, a fermata over the final barline meant the same thing.
The need to have staff text which is local to a single layout has been acknowledged as important by the team… meanwhile you can use the custom scale property in the score to make it invisible there, or simply drag it off the page.
Heh . . . I always thought it meant “very swiftly.” Neat!
I’ve been setting up some Master Pages to handle blank V.S. pages which is quite common in commercial music. Sometimes the layout dictates having music on 4 staves of a left page followed by a blank right page that has a big V.S. (Or sometimes “This page has been left blank to facilitate page turns.”) in the middle of it and then the music starts again on the next left page. Also, the way I use V.S. symbols is when the page turn comes higher up on the page, like after the 3rd or 4th system of music. It’s just an indication saying I know this page isn’t full but it’s intentional… turn the page to get to the next bit of music.
In thinking about it, I kind of wonder if Dorico could add a native V.S. option to the Frame Break in Engrave mode. Maybe it’s something in the properties panel when you select the Frame Break icon. It gives you the choice to add a text at the end of the last bar before the frame break. And perhaps the choice to also make the frame break a double frame break giving you that blank right page. Just throwing it out there! 