(While there is some overlap here with another post [Divisi soloist appears in wrong place], it also has some issues that weren’t covered in the previous post.)
I’m writing a piece for SATB choir in open score, and I’d like the member of a section (in this case, a soprano) to sing a solo. Specifically, I’d like the solo staff to appear only when it has music in it—I’d like it to appear and disappear mid-staff if necessary, perhaps with an indication to join the section at the end of the solo. My instinct was to create a new instrument (a Solo Soprano) in setup mode, but that didn’t achieve what I was looking for, so I tried the Change Divisi function, which opened up a whole other set of challenges.
First, as previously posted, while it seems to create a solo staff above the section staff, it actually creates a section staff below the soloist. This would make logical sense if the section itself were divided, in which case the top staff would be the principal staff, but it’s the opposite of how a soloist works, where the main music is on the bottom staff. It became more confusing for me when I tried to Restore Unison: any music that I had written in the section staff disappeared at the unison, and I was forced to write any music I wanted in the solo staff, which is the opposite of what I was expecting. Again, this would make sense if the section were dividing, but it’s the inverse of how a soloist in a section works.
Switching to Galley View shows that the section staff disappears at the tutti, leaving the soloist visible and creating a large gap between (in this case) the soprano soloist and the alto section, making working in Galley View unwieldy. At the same time, this is almost what I want to happen, but it’s backwards: I want the section staff to be visible at all times, but the solo staff to disappear when it doesn’t have any music. Is there a way to reverse this, or to specify that the solo staff is invisible when empty? In Layout Options, there’s a tickbox to “show extra staves across full system when starting or stopping” (it’s currently not checked), but checking or unchecking it does not seem to affect the score.
To my mind, it would make sense for divisi and solo staves to work in different ways from each other—either that, or it could be specified which staff represents the principal music. For a solo staff to override the section isn’t just confusing—it’s backwards. And if there isn’t a way to hide the solo staff when it’s empty, I think that would be a feature worth adding.
