I wasn't going to get back into this thread, but I did want to respond to your thoughtful note re self-publication. I agree with all that you said, and in fact all of my music so far has been self-published. I just didn't think that was what we were talking about. And, honestly, when I look at much self-published music out there, I give thanks that Noteworthy is as good as it is. It's not as good as it can get, but I think that's why we're here.
I have checked six different music publishers' submission guidelines. I quit at that point because all of them said exactly what I expected them to. As The Boosey & Hawkes guidelines quite eloquently put it:
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Please make sure the copy is legible.
Beethoven could never have been published under that guideline, but that is beside the point. Finale scores, Sibelius scores, Noteworthy scores, handwritten scores - it's all the same, because the publisher will redo it in house style anyway.
One gets to know a business when one has spent thirty years in it. And I am now going to join Lawrie, wherever he went. He is a very wise man, and we all should follow his example more often.
Most of what you say makes sense, Rick, but I'm not sure about the muted notes. It seems to me as though they have to be treated as rests in order to synchronize the playback of the remainder of the music. Rests and muted notes are both holes in the music, and it seems redundant to have two different ways to make them happen.
As for ties to muted notes: I had actually made some on purpose a few minutes before I read your post. I had a multi-measure held note followed by a multi-measure rest in one voice against passagework in another, and I was trying to figure out how long to hold the note before cutting it off to begin the rest. I thought muting the tied notes one at a time, beginning at the rest and moving back toward the first note of the tied series, would be a clever way to test this. Of course, it didn't work. I'm not sure it has to work, but it does show one possible use of a tie to a muted note.
But I'm certainly with you on the muted staves and muted grace notes.
This is a small thing, but it would be nice if the dynamics and the performance style markings would line up vertically. Currently there is a slight misalignment that is noticable when they are next to each other. I believe the font size of the dynamics is also slightly smaller than the one used for the performance styles. Here's an example (you may have to view it in print preview and magnify it highly to see what I'm talking about):
I think I agree with Rob about locking this thread, although it should probably stick around as an object lesson.
I don't want to write bidderxyzzy off completely - check his contributions to the thread on the page numbering bug in 2.20 - but when he gets on his high horse (which is most of the time) and starts being snide, insulting and condescending, he pushes every button I've got, and this thread is full of it ;-)
John's headbanging smiley expresses my frustration perfectly. Lawrie has apparently left the building. It's probably time to pull the plug.
Thanks, Lawrie. Of course the right driver is necessary (as is a good soundfont bank). I guess what I was trying to get at was the same point you made - that people aren't limited to Microsoft's choices if they know how to change the MIDI settings in NWC. I suspect many users will do that more readily for a standalone card sitting out there in its little box than they will for a card mounted within the computer's frame, which they expect the computer to be able to handle by itself. This is true even for my daughter, who is an expert computer user (she has a small side business doing Web design) but couldn't figure out why the sound on her laptop was so lousy even when she plugged it into a decent set of speakers. After trying several other tacks, I convinced her to buy the SB standalone, and now she's happy as a clam (are clams happy?)
I have not published music, but I doubt that industry is substantially different from the book-publishing world, with which I am intimately familiar. If you have something they don't want to publish, they'll measure the margins of your MS and reject it if they're a millimeter to narrow. If you have something they do want to publish, they don't care if it's submitted handwritten in purple ink on lined yellow paper, which is how Ogden Nash used to submit his poetry in an era when other poets' work was being rejected for the wrong typescript format. The blunt fact is that they're going to reset it before publication anyway, so that it matches house style. This is true even if you submit it electronically, either on disc or via e-mail. Trust me on this.
I'm sorry, bidderxyzzy, but the world just doesn't operate on the level of perfection you seem to want it to. I was going to offer you good luck in getting it there, but I really don't want it there. I prefer a little tolerance for differences. It might do you a world of good if you would practice a little tolerance, too.
No regrets, Rick. You had no way of knowing what would happen, and the exchange may have been fruitful for some users who haven't dug as deep into the program as some of the rest of us.
Bidderxyzzy, there are three reasons I don't mind doing workarounds to get the sound right, and then hiding them:
I can get the sound I want now while I wait for future improvements.
The program isn't cluttered up with multiple ways to call the same MIDI operation and complicated routines to get simple results. You may have noticed the downloads are still under one megabyte. Incredible and admirable in this day and age.
Having the ability to hide playback staves means that others can come up with symbol fonts (such as BoxMarks, or Lawrie's suites) that can deal with some of NWC's omissions and still be made to sound right.
I could probably come up with others, on reflection. As to the engraving, as I pointed out earlier, I have never had a performer complain, and that's really what counts, isn't it? Do your scores really have to go into the Music Engravers' Hall of Fame? Isn't it enough that they are easy to read, and that your intentions are clear?
One solution I haven't seen mentioned here is a standalone soundcard. My daughter got one a few weeks ago for her Vista laptop and reports that it works great. Plugs into the USB port. Hers is an SB Live!, but there are others available, most of them for very reasonable prices.
OK - guilty as charged. I didn't see the bit in your post about being afraid your users would get into the contents box and turn on the hidden staves. Jumped right over it to the little golden highlights. (They're grey on my machine, but never mind.) I guess I skipped that bit because I can't figure out why you would care if your users saw the hidden staves. No one is ever likely to get there by accident - it takes three separate and distinct steps, and the chance of accidentally doing them all in order is pretty low. That leaves us with the people who get there by fiddling around with the program, and they are likely to be able to fiddle their way back out again. After all, if they are registered NWC users, they have a right to use the program as they please - they don't have to limit themselves to only doing what you want them to. So what's the problem?
OK - let's try this again on the hidden staves. I'm sorry we don't seem to be making ourselves clear. The technique we are talking about hides staves completely, on both the screen and the printout. No "sort of goldish highlight." Nothing.
Please open a multi-stave file in Noteworthy. Now, under the file menu, choose "Page Setup." Click on the tab at the far left, labeled "contents." You will see two text boxes, one labeled "groups" and the other labeled "visible parts." The "visible parts" box will contain the same number of lines of text as there are staves in your score. Each of these lines will consist of the name of one of the staves, plus a checkbox at the left end of the line. By default, each of these is checked. If you uncheck any of them, the staff it corresponds with will disappear completely from the screen. Vanished. Kaput. Gone. But it will still play during playback. So to get the playback to sound right on a staff that needs a lot of tweaking with what would otherwise be hidden notes:
Create a second copy of the staff, so that you have two identical staves.
Make one copy look right, and then mute it.
Make the other copy sound right, and then hide it by unchecking it in the "contents" box.
I hope this helps.
As to the look of NWC scores, I have never had a performer complain, even about NWC I. My stuff is usually played by professional musicians (music faculty at our local university, mostly), and they can be pretty picky. I do agree that the very early versions of NWC (mid-1990s) produced pretty raw-looking scores. I stuck through the program through those days because of its ease of use and its potential, and I feel that potential is now being realized. I suspect most others in this forum would say the same thing. We're a pretty loyal bunch, as you might have noticed. When you call our baby a "joke," we tend to get upset. That is the long and the short of our disagreement with you - or, at least, it is of mine.
I hope this helps, too.
Good luck with the hidden staves. Let us know how they come out.
Well, as you say, David, the title info will only print at the beginning of the file - but the page number can be anything. This capability goes back some distance into version I: I have pieces with multiple movements printed at least as far back as 2001 with correct pagination and title info for all movements. So signzak's problem is new. But you are right that it has to be the first page of the file. It would be nice to be able to stick titles in anywhere, so we could combine multiimoevement works into a single file, but there are things that are higher priority.
If it's correct in print preview, then the rendering engine is getting it right. I suspect Lawrie is correct about it being a bug in the new print routines, which release 2.20 did alter. Here's the relevant entry in the release notes:
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# File, Print, Print range should use starting page number specified in File, Page Setup
I would guess this is a bug Eric will want to fix soon, but he will have to make that decision. Until then, I suggest printing the title page with the starting page set to 1 (it doesn't carry a number anyhow), and then printing the rest of the file with the correct page numbers. Hope this helps....
Splitting the beam into different colors wouldn't be easy, as the beams are drawn as single lines from the first note stem to the last note stem in the beamed group. The other stems are then drawn to the beam(s). Using layers, as Rick suggests, may prove to be a workable alternative in most cases, although it might still be tricky to split the beam. I realize we haven't been much help....
As far as I can tell, NWC has always tied chords with more than two notes in this manner: ties above the midline sloped upward, ties below sloped downward. I've occasionally resorted to layers when these made the printed music unclear. But I think you are right, Lawrie, that ties crossing note heads is a new problem. I just checked back through several of my printed scores looking for ties, and all of them (including the tied seconds) avoided the noteheads.
....and Schroeder says to Charlie Brown, "Guess what! I have perfect pitch!" And Charlie Brown replies, "You mean a perfect pitch, and besides, who cares? The baseball season is over."....
Peanuts strip from 30 years ago. Couldn't resist. Amazing what the mind chooses to retain....;-)
There's a dandy little program called Abcmus that reads and writes abc notation. It has a very nice automatic chord setting utility, and can export in MIDI, which means NWC can import the results. You do have to know abc music notation, though (not hard to learn). You can find it at http://www.norbeck.nu/abcmus/; there's a good discussion of abc there, too.
How far back is a while back? The difference I'm applauding as I do these transpositions is primarily in enharmonics - I have yet to come across a single double flat or double sharp that should be the next note below or above instead. There have been a sharp or two that would be better rendered as flats, and vice versa, but most of it has been very clean. Maybe it helps that I'm transposing by a major 2nd or a perfect 5th instead of a more distant interval such as a semitone or a tritone.....?
I've been converting a piece for brass quintet and piano from C score to conductor's score, so I've been using the staff transposition tool a lot, and it's suddenly struck me that - unlike my experience in the past - the accidentals are hardly ever having to be corrected. Is this an undocumented new feature of beta 2.20? If so, I applaud!
I got curious about this, so I pulled out my copy of the Harvard Dictionary, and Cyril is right: Willi Apel defines a glissando in piano style (i.e., the individual notes have to be sounded) and calls the trombone version portamento, "frequently but erroneously called glissando." Being an old reference librarian, though - and having written an encyclopedia of my own (in another field) - I decided to check two other sources. My shelves also hold Arthur Jacobs' New Dictionary of Music and Westrup and Harrison's New College Encyclopedia of Music, and both of them disagree with Apel. Here are Jacobs's succinct definitions:
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GLISSANDO: sliding up and down on the scale, i.e., making a quick uninterrupted passage up or down the scale, e.g., on the piano, harp, xylophone, trombone. The effect of portamento on stringed instruments is not comparable, since it implies only the smooth linking of two notes, not the deliberate sounding of the notes in between.
PORTAMENTO: the "carrying" of a sound - e.g., on a voice or a stringed instrument, the transition from one note to another higher or lower without any break in the sound.
Westrup and Harrison say the same thing, only much wordier. Which definition is correct? As a trained vocalist who also plays a bit of piano and harp, I'd have to say: perhaps both. Are you emphasizing the notes at the beginning and end? Probably a portamento. Are you emphasizing the slide itself? Probably a glissando. The relevant point for this thread - getting back to business - is the symbol you place in the score. Although this is not always true, custom suggests a straight line for a portamento and a wavy line for a glissando. So, ideally, we should have the line type option that Lawrie suggests, and one of the options should be wavy. But I'll settle simply for the ability to draw lines at all.
All those things you mentioned in MS Word - automatic capitalization, automatic superscripts, automatic translation to hyperlinks, etc. - can be turned off. They're all turned off on my machine. You just have to be willing to dig a little deeper into the program (you'll find most of them, as Rob suggests, under "autocorrect options").
Mainly, that's what we're asking you to do with NWC - dig a little deeper. Most of the things you are complaining that the program can't do can actually be done if you're willing to do that digging. Your earlier confusion (in another thread) among invisible objects, layered staves, and hidden staves comes to mind. Are you using hidden staves for playback yet? Or, as in so many of the suggestions we've made, are you simply rejecting them out of hand?
As to your tone, I think the word "supercilious" fits it best. Look it up.
Early in one of the other threads on this forum, you stated that you were well aware of your tone and chose it on purpose. Do you understand yet that it doesn't work? Can you choose something else?
Look: we're trying to be friends, here. Some of us have gone out of our way to praise your insights when they are on target. A little friendliness back, a little willingness to admit that you might occasionally be wrong, and you'd be surprised how soon the walls melt away.
Good point about nesting. Might have to use layered staves to do nested lines without compromising program efficiency. But I don't see an extra diamond anchor as clutter if it's doing a job I want done. :-)
Very interesting idea, Rick - using an eighth-note beam as a line. Looks like what Lawrie is asking for, except that you have to put it on a layered staff and kludge the anchor points. Wouldn't it be easier for the program as well as the user if you were able to simply place anchor points instead of creating them out of headless, stemless, muted notes on another staff?
But I will begin making lines this way, and thank you.
Rick, I think you're making this too complicated. What I hear Lawrie suggesting is specifiying anchor points and asking the program to dynamically draw the line. The anchor points would be the objects, not the line. It seems to me as though an anchor point (a) wouldn't need width or MIDI characteristics, and (b) could easily be specified in relation to other objects in the score, e.g., after a given note (rest, barline....) and before the next. Vertical position of each anchor point would be specified in relation to the staff, as it is for all other objects. The program is drawing dynamic lines now (e.g., slurs and ties), so the code shouldn't be too hard to generate. Am I missing something?
Thanks for the suggestion, Lawrie. I currently use Boxmarks brackets plus a line of hyphens inserted as a text object, but that isn't really satisfactory. I guess it's time I looked into your fonts.
Sounds good to me. If line type included broken lines (as Lawrie suggests) it would also allow us to draw 8va brackets - something I've wanted for a long time.
Thanks for the clarification, Peter. The invisible-rest idea is new to me, and I may start using it (didn't know that when you make a rest invisible you also take away its effect on the length of the measure - that's a good trick to have handy).
However, it doesn't correct the misdrawn slur at the beginning of the next system. If you use an invisible rest there, you simply void the slur (no matter whether the rest is slurred with the note or not). That's because a slur drawn from an invisible object is itself invisible. Any ideas for that one? I've been using a layer with a headless, stemless, muted note, but there may be a better way.
As for the dip in the slur across the end of the system in published music - good observation. I hadn't looked closely enough at published scores, and when I did I realized that engravers do dip slurs at system breaks. But the dip doesn't drop all the way to the barline, and then start again at the beginning barline on the next system, as NWC has it doing. I suspect Eric just has the program treat the barline as the final object in the slur in the first system and the first object in the slur in the second. A good first approximation, but I think it might be time to refine it a little.
bidderxyzzy, please read Lawrie's recent post - including the apology at the end - very carefully. Until you get to the apology the language is most un-Lawrie-like. If you have gotten under his extremely tolerant skin, imagine what you have done to some of the rest of us with lower flash points. Actually, you don't have to imagine; just read some of the other posts that followed your most recent rant.
Do you understand yet? Your insights are welcome. Your tone is not. This forum is designed to point to possible improvements in the program, not to insult the intelligence of the programmer. We are Eric's helpers, not his superiors. And, no, you aren't his superior either.
It is very revealing to me that you "put up" with MS Word's spelling and grammar checkers. Most of us don't put up with them, we turn them off. Most of us also find workarounds for the problems in NWC, and are thankful for the ability to do that, instead of leaving the problems hanging out there in our scores and just putting up with them. The program definitely could be better; that's what we're here for. Dumping garbage on it doesn't help.
Peter, please read Rick's reply, directly above yours. The music I write or transcirbe in NWC is full of what he calls "flat arcs" in the last measure of a system. Some are ties across the system break, and some are slurs across the system break, and it is very difficult to tell them apart, as both go to the barline at the end of the system. If there are both a tie and a slur across a system break, you get two parallel flat arcs, both ending at the barline. A proper slur across a system break ends at the break in the middle of what would be its normal arc across the note grouping it encloses, and simply picks up the same arc again at the beginning of the next system. It's difficult to describe this in words, so please paste this into a blank NWC score:
If you look at this "music" (I use the word advisedly) in print preview, you'll see the problem. The b-b tie in m. 4-5 and the b-g slur in m. 8-9 don't look exactly alike - the slur has a higher arc - but they both begin and end at about the same vertical position on the staff. The slur should be rising, and should end "in the air" above the barline at the end of the second system, to prepare to come down to the g.
Note that the tie itself is also wrong: it should come into the second system at the top of a flat arc, so that it ties to something from outside the system. Instead, it ties to the barline at the beginning of the system. But this is much less problematic than the behavior of the slur.
One thing I would very much like to see fixed soon in NWC is the handling of slurs across system breaks. Currently, a slur that begins in one system and continues to the next is treated as two slurs, one from the first note you want slurred to the end of the first system and the other beginning at the start of the next system and ending at the note where you've chosen to end your (single) slur. The broken slur needs to begin and end "in the air," instead, so that if the beginning and ending barlines were placed together the slur would make a continuous curve. This is not just a matter of aesthetics: the current method makes it far too easy to confuse a slur with a tie, and thus misread the music. On a scale of one to ten, I would rank the need to get this one fixed as a ten. You can sort of kludge around it with headless, stemless, muted notes on a layered staff, but it's a pain to construct and it doesn't really work very well.
Actually, there is a great deal of ambiguity among keyboard players (and all other musicians) about how music should be read, and the further back in time you go, the greater the ambiguity. I recommend Thurston Dart's wonderful little book, The Interpretation of Music. It's fifty years old, now, but still the best work I know on the subject.
Actually, NWC won't let you put two notes of different durations in the same chord on the same staff with the stems pointing the same direction - and if you try to add a note with a third duration to that chord, the program will refuse to enter it. So if you are working without layers, and have different durations in the same chord, you already have stems pointing in opposite directions. But I agree with bidderxyzzy again here: layers are the method NWC provides for putting more than one voice on the same staff. When I said they were a small price to pay, I was referring to the work involved, which is greater than it would be if you could work on a single staff. I'm sorry if that was misunderstood.
I love layers. They give you much greater flexibility than you get while working on a single unlayered staff. Voices can cross each other, rests can go where you want them to, multiple durations can appear in the same chord - you can even put several different-sounding instruments on the same staff, in the same chord, and hear all of them correctly during playback. What was asked at the beginning of this thread, though, was a question about limitations in the method NWC has provided for writing two voices on a single staff without layering. Is there a way to get around those? The simple answer is "no". The more complicated answer is "yes, but not without making some fairly deep changes in the program." The way two-voice staves are handled would have to be reconceived. The note-stem suggestion I made was just an additional kludge that would fix part of the problem -which, as many others have pointed out here, is really not a problem, just a different way of viewing how the program should operate.
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I do not want NoteWorthy making this determination based on stem directions or voice analysis any more than I want a word processor to insert or remove commas based on whether my clauses are dependent or independent. Nor do I want it telling me where I must or should not have bar lines.
Neither do I, Rick - neither do I. I was just explaining how it could be done, not how it should be done.
Well, one way would be by the direction of the stems. Another might be by checking the location of the next barline and doing the math - although that would depend on the user placing the barline correctly, so it wouldn't be completely dependable. It would also take a fair amount of extra code. But checking the stem direction shouldn't be hard to implement. The backward compatibility issue is what seems to me to make this problem less important to work on than some others, because I do think it would require enough changes in the file structure, and in the rendering engine, to make compatibility a problem. I'd love to be proved wrong.
It seems as though we've had this discussion about bugs before, elsewhere in this forum, bidderxyzzy;-); but in this case, I agree with you. NWC doesn't render two voices on the same staff correctly. The problem David pointed to (the inability to beam the lower voice of a two-voice setting) is related. It doesn't have to be drum parts: beaming only works on the upper voice of any two-voice setting. I've run up against this situation many times.
The real problem here is that NWC doesn't actually do two voices on the same staff. What it appears to do (I haven't seen the code, so I can't say for sure) is to look at a chord with two different note durations in it, choose the shorter duration, and render the rest of the measure as if the shorter note's duration was the duration of the whole chord. You can watch this happen. Take any multi-part score in 4/4 and place a whole note in one of the parts. The measures in that part will line up with the rest of the parts. Now create a second line of quarter notes on the same staff as the whole note. As you place the first quarter note (the one you do by <control><enter> against the whole note), the measure will immediately shrink to the length of a quarter note, and will slowly expand as you enter the remaining three notes until the bars line up again. If you backspace those quarter notes out of existence, the measure will shrink again, and then jump back up to its proper length as you erase the quarter note that is directly against the whole note. It is a telling fact that, to add or erase notes in the voice with shorter durations, you use a simple enter or backspace rather than <control><enter> or <control><backspace>. As far as the program is concerned, you are adding and subtracting beats to or from the measure as a whole, not to or from a single voice.
Not sure if that last paragraph makes a lot of sense if you haven't figured it out already. The bottom line, here, is that two-voice writing on a single staff in NWC is done as a sort of kludge, and this leads to incorrect notation in a small but significant number of cases. I'm not sure there's a way around this without completely restructuring the format in which NWC writes files, which would open a whole can of worms. One thing we would be likely to lose - besides backward compatibility - would be the extremely small size of NWC files. IMO, resorting to layering in these cases is a small price to pay.
I just reread my post of last night, and I spotted this:
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an orchestral bracket that stops and starts where the orchestral staves do instead of continuing from the first orchestral staff all the way to the bottom of the score regardless of the actual staff properties down there
"...all the way to the bottom of the score regardless of the actual staff properties..." Hmmm. That sounds very much like.....Oh, no! A bug!
Let's face it. If the staves below the orchestral staves were exhibiting the properties we are already telling the program to give them, the problem would disappear (almost - see below). In other words, unwanted and unexpected behavior from the code. The tone of bidderxyzzy's earlier posts (he has improved lately) had kept me from seeing the obvious.
However, there is still the matter of layered staves of other types in order to make the workarounds happen. If the orchestral brackets stop and start for those, we're in trouble. So I think Peter is right - we will need a lower orchestral staff type. And for the same reason, I think we'll need an upper orchestral staff type. We need to be able to designate where we want the brackets to start and stop.
But correcting the staff attribute display is the right place to start.
At the risk of offending you again, bidderxyzzy (and just when we were getting along so well, too - viz. my support of your position a few posts back ;-), I have to say that Lawrie is right. There are no rules for the LH end of a system, just conventions, and your conventions may not suit my needs. In my large (though not overwhelming) collection of orchestral scores, almost all use grand-staff-type braces outside (to the left of) the orchestral brackets to connect the first and second violins. The few that don't usually use nested brackets, although at least one uses nothing. This is on the basis of a number of random samples I pulled out just now - mostly Kalmus editions, though one was a Belwin and another (the one that used nothing) was a Heugel.
I do agree with you that if the default was as you suggest, it would be better than the current situation. But we would still need controls to take care of individual needs and/or quirks. This is art, not engineering.
I also agree with you that nested brackets are something for the wish list rather than an immediate need. What most of us who have been contributing to this thread appear to want, essentially, are four simple binary choices: (1) finial/no finial; (2) brace/no brace; (3) thick line, thin line/thin line only. (4) barlines connecting staves/barlines not connecting staves. And since (2) and (4) can be kludged, all we really are asking for is control over the finials plus an orchestral bracket that stops and starts where the orchestral staves do instead of continuing from the first orchestral staff all the way to the bottom of the score regardless of the actual staff properties down there - which is, I think, the behavior that caused you to start this thread in the first place.
Actually, David, browser links can go to a file residing on the user's computer. It's just that they use html or one of its descendents instead of the windows compiled help language, and users don't have to have two separate hypertext language interpretation programs on their machines. Abandonment of Windows Help has irritated me, too, but I see Microsoft's point.
Thanks for the reality check, David, especially since you seem to be echoing comments I made earlier in this thread...;-) (But you're doing it better because you're including examples.)
However, I think K.A.T. has it right. It would be really, really nice to have the same kind of control over the left-hand end of each stave as we currently do over the right-hand end. Then everybody could have it the way they wanted.
how would that work, another thick line joining the affected staves with additional finials?
I got curious about that, too, so I checked my collection of orchestral scores. Warren may have a different experience, but what I found was a piano-style bracket outside the orchestral group bracket. That is: orchestra bracket surrounding the string section on the left; piano bracket to the left of the orchestral bracket, enclosing just the violin I and violin II staves. Layering allows us to do this now. Just place an empty set of upper and lower grand staves between the orchestral staves you want to bracket and then layer every other staff. I'd attach a file, but I'd apparently have to upgrade my membership, and I'm too lazy to do that right now. ;-)
....but I think you're getting more complex than necessary, Lawrie. Here's another way:
When an orchestral staff is followed or preceded by a standard staff, the program puts the appropriate finial on the orchestral staff.
The beginning barline of a standard staff is optional (same set of choices as the ending barline is now).
Connecting barlines default to the barline style of the standard staff, except within brackets.
That should do it, I think, although I may be missing something, and there are certainly other possibilities.
(just looked at the link you posted while I was writing this. There are evidently further layers of brackets in some scores, which I haven't run into. My workaround doesn't work for those, and my suggested program modification wouldn't, either....more thought is obviously required.)
The human voice has no intrinsic pitch so it must get its notes relative to the other parts. So it helps to know what the other parts are singing
That's the crux of it. You really do need to able to match pitch with a note from another part, or at least be able to match an easy interval (a third or a fifth) from another part, in order to find your entrance. Hence, you need the other parts in front of you, plus the accompaniment, because sometimes the note you need to match is there instead of in another voice part. This doesn't hold for those with perfect pitch, of course, but they are few and far between in the choral world.
And that's why distributing MIDI files probably won't work for bidderxyzzy's application (although it might if he also distributed printed copies of the score). I've been trying to think of ways that would work without allowing access to all the editing tools, and I'm stumped. If one could change tempo and mute individual lines in Noteworthy Viewer, that would go a long way toward solving the problem, but it still wouldn't help those who needed to mark their scores - and singers need a lot of marks. It looks to me as though bidderxyzzy's particular application of NWC does need to be set up in the way he has done it. The one suggestion I would make, bidderxyzzy, is to trust the singers a little further and go ahead and use the hidden staves for playback. You might highlight them in a different color from the rest of the score so they really stand out if they are accidentally unchecked in the contents box - but that problem can also be minimized if you tell them what that checkbox does, and how to make the score look normal again if they (or their inquisitive children) play around with the page setup functions a bit too much. That, again, is a matter of how far you want to trust their ability to work with the program.
As to professional instrumentalists not needing full scores - they usually don't, but my experience (recounted earlier in this thread) suggests that there are times when they prefer them. Surprised me, too, at the time.
However, I would have thought that for a performance they would have preferred the single parts. For rehearsal I can absolutely understand but by the time a performance came along surely they would know the piece well enough that their single parts would suffice?
I guess most people have no idea how professional chamber music groups operate. There were only two rehearsals - the one in which I handed out the parts, and the final one. The performance was the next day. The piece wasn't scheduled to be performed again, so that was it. What you suggest would make sense for amateur groups, though.
But there's a P.S. About a year later, I had a piano trio performed. Same chamber group - different subset of players. Having learned (I thought) from the earlier performance, I handed them each a full score. They politely handed them back and asked for individual parts. Like I said, you just never know. ;-)
If one is preparing scores for multiple parts/instruments/voices why wouldn't one print the separate single parts? To me this seems such a logical move. Reduced page turns, easier to find your place, thinner portfolio...
Well....
A couple of years ago, I had a piece for soprano, flute, bassoon and vibraphone that was headed for performance by a local chamber group. I very carefully printed out all the parts individually and handed them to the instrumentalists, with a full score for the soprano. When I got to the final rehearsal, I found that the instrumentalists had all gotten together, pasted up their parts into a full score minus soprano, and made copies for each of them. (They could have just asked me or the soprano for a copy of the full score, of course, but that's not what happened.) Their explanation: cues weren't enough. They wanted to see each other's parts and see how the counterpoint fit together in order to perform the music properly, even if it meant they had to run the music across two stands each to avoid page turns in awkward places. You just never know.
To answer your question, Lawrie, just about any of us who regularly perform single parts from multi-voice scores find it helpful to have groups of parts set off by brackets. This includes choirs (especially those performing with piano and/or soloists), piano quintets, chamber groups with unusual instrument combinations (such as, say, two winds. three strings, and a couple of percussionists) - lots of possibilities there. Groupings make following your own part easier. And, of course - as you recognize - the conductor's need is not trivial....
But I do agree that ossia and cues are more important, as are (for me) several other things, including better slur drawing and a pause button. And you are certainly correct that all of us can never fully agree on one single priorities list for improvements to our favorite notation program.
Thanks again for your always clear, helpful, and friendly comments.
Well, we'd need both an upper orchestral staff and a lower orchestral staff attribute, and the groups should be connected by a single line on the left rather than simply extending the heavy-thin double line pattern of the bracket across the break. But Peter has the right idea. The breaks in bar lines between staves within systems are already implemented - standard staves and upper/lower grand staves break them now, and these can be interpolated into a score, and layered if necessary, as has already been pointed out in this thread. Mostly what we need now are the finials.
However, my earlier point still stands: this is pretty trivial. No score of mine has ever been rejected by a performance group because the instrument groups weren't bracketed properly. I suppose it could happen, but the possibility seems remote. I'd like to see this fixed, but there are other things that affect the readability of scores more - properly drawn slurs come to mind - and if Eric chooses to fix these first, he has my blessing.
As to the bug/not bug argument, I give up. If you want to use the term in a different way than the vast majority of the world does, that is your right. The reason I have been harping on it so hard is that it makes communication difficult when we define terms in different ways. I once wrote, singlehandedly, a 300.000 word encyclopedia. It is now considered a standard reference work in its field, but that is beside the point. The point is that before writing each article I looked up multiple definitions of each term and then went with the consensus. Sometimes the consensus differed from the way I had always used a word (I had worked in the field for twenty years a the time), but when that happened I had to assume it was I that was out of step, not the majority. Otherwise the work would have been rejected for poor scholarship. Habit is not always a satisfactory guide.
Finally: there is much in Lawrie's last post that is very wise (as Lawrie's posts usually are). The point about hidden staves vs. the invisibility attribute is particularly well taken. If you haven't found the hidden staff function, which is pretty straightforward and obvious, then I have to wonder if you've really explored the program's capabilities adequately. Please do that before you complain about other features of the program. You may find, as Lawrie said, that the answers to your problem already exist.
