Copy Rehearsal marks and tempo changes to another staff (duplicating them for rehearsal/piano reduction score)

• Feb 17, 2021 - 14:56

Hi, I have a choral score and I prepared a separate score with an extra piano part for a piano reduction. This is useful for rehearsals.

What I would like to do is to copy all rehearsal marks and tempo changes to the piano staff as well, duplicating that information.

The rehearsal marks will make it easier for the pianist to find his bar and the tempo markings will allow the pianist to immediately find the right tempo.

Now, I realize it may be too much to ask for an automatic duplication feature and I would already be happy if I could just use copy/paste to do this. Alas, I cannot get it to work.

(I tried:
- right click on the rehearsal mark,
- select / all similar elements on same staff
- copy
And then selecting the target bar on the piano grand staff and paste. But nothing is pasted.

I also tried to simply manually insert rehearsal marks on the piano grand staff. They still end up at the top of the score, and I have to manually re-enter the text, and disable automatic placement, and then manually move it to the piano staff and ensure it is aligned. Even for a small score, this is a lot of work - too much.

Attachment Size
reduction.png 36.56 KB

Comments

Concerning the copy and paste issue (not concerning the placement), doesn't it work, if you select the first element in the target measure for pasting it instead of the target measure at once?

In reply to by Roland Bouman

Sorry for late reply, life is so fast moving. Next time I promise to read your request from start until to the end before starting confusion. I only checked in rush to copy and paste a single system element (I wasn't aware about, that's possible), I didn't check it with a selection of system elements (although the issue tracker suggestion was known for me ;-).

I agree that rehearsal marks in the piano part would be nice. But I think that reducing the space between vocal staves would help a lot. If you post part of the score, we could help more.

We definitely would like to see a way to specify where tempo, rehearsal, and other system-level markings should be repeated, so this can happen automatically. Meanwhile the best solution is to simply add those as ordinary text but set their style to be that of the desired marking, using the Inspector. In most cases little or no additional adjustment would be needed.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

BTW I'm just looking through some of my orchestral scores and interestingly:
a) Virtually all of them have all tempo markings repeated above the string section. This is true even on reduced systems where there's only a single other staff above them!
b) Rehearsal marks are sometimes repeated above the string section, sometimes not. In some scores they're repeated below the bottom staff. I'm not convinced treating rehearsal marks differently to tempo markings significantly improves score readability.
c) Very rarely a particular system marking is NOT repeated above the (full) string section, but in the cases I found I couldn't see any good reason this should be so, and may have simply been an oversight by the typesetter. In one case the tempo marking was moved above the harp part, even though just two pages before tempo markings had been below the harp part (above the strings). Again, I can't see any good reason for this nor would I imagine a conductor would choose to work off a score with tempo markings that don't appear at consistent placings in the score.
d) It's not uncommon for an extra staff such as "solo violin" to appear above the standard string staves, and in such cases, the tempo marking moves above that. Which leads to an interesting idea - that whether to show the system markings could be a property of a bracket? If not, then there'd really need to be a way to add an instrument staff like this that's mostly hidden but still allows the tempo marking to appear as expected.
e) If the violin I part is hidden in the string section, the tempo/rehearsal mark may or may not be shown. An example is page 83 of the B&H Rite of Spring score, which has a very condensed system with only Cl/Horn/Cello/Db - and only a single tempo/rehearsal mark above the whole system. But on page 112, the rehearsal mark [132] is in fact repeated above the reduced string section (Cello+Db only). Similarly on page 120.
f) if the whole string section is hidden, markings normally shown above it are not shown at all. Obviously if they're shown below the score they should be in this case too (unless perhaps there's only a single visible staff for the whole system).
f) Very few scores showed tempo or rehearsal markings in more than two places, however my UE Mahler 8 study score has tempo markings above Chorus and Strings (and rehearsal markings only at the very top and very bottom of the score), though not entirely consistently (e.g. very first bar has the tempo only at the very top, and later in the piece, e.g. from rehearsal mark 73, it also shows tempo markings above the brass section instead of the choir, sometimes alternating on a page-by-page basis, then at rehearsal mark 106 the tempo markings are shown in 4 locations - at top, above brass, above pianos/harps (but below harmonium), and above strings. Frankly I don't think MuseScore should make this easy to do, I can't imagine the full conductor's score is laid out like this.
OTOH my OUP study score for Sinfonia Antartica does quite consistently have tempo and rehearsal markings shown above 4 staves through the score, with one or two condensed systems where it wouldn't be sensible to do so.

On that basis I'd say...

a) critical: the ability to specify that system elements (tempo/rehearsal marks etc.) by default should be shown above at least one other staff, consistently throughout the score. Minimal expectation is that for systems where this staff is hidden, it's shown above first visible staff below it, if any. The default orchestral templates should have this configured for the 1st violin line.
b) better: as above, but the ability to override this for particular system elements, e.g. for particularly condensed systems where for space reasons it's more sensible to only show it at the very top.
c) even better: the ability to specify that, e.g. tempo markings are to be shown above at least one other staff (or below the whole system), and a separate similar configuration for rehearsal marks.
d) ultimate solution, the ability to specify multiple staves where such elements should appear above/below, and the ability to override on a per-marking basis (it's sufficient to be able to just hide a particular marking over a particular staff)

BTW I don't believe this a difficult feature to implement - the hard part (collision avoidance etc.) has already been implemented, and the UI need not be particularly complex (it could almost be just a checkbox property of a staff). But it would save a lot of messing around trying to replicate the appearance of such markings using staff text elements etc.

In reply to by Dylan Nicholson1

Good analysis! I agree actual implementation is trivial, once the design is decided upon. Probably only a few lines of code to do the actual displaying of the system elements on other staves, plus whatever is needed to add the necessary controls to the appropriate dialog boxes or whatever. But deciding on that design is the tricky part - @tantacrul should have the final word there. And @oktophonie for deciding what appropriate defaults are.

In reply to by Dylan Nicholson1

Good summary! Duplicated system markings are necessary not just in orchestral scores but also (as the original poster was asking for) for scores with piano + more than one other voice or instrument. Or sometimes even with only one other instrument. And different scores/publishers/instrumentations need different settings for this so you're quite right that we need a flexible system.

Your idea of having this a setting that applies to a bracket is a good one that I also thought about a while ago. (This was a feature we wanted in 3.6 but didn't have time for.) Each duplicated instance of a system marking really applies to a section (consecutive range of staves), rather than a single stave, so is to be shown when any of the staves of that section are visible in a system. Since the vertical justification routine at the moment creates extra space between bracketed sections, but just using a single multiplier value for all brackets in the score, further options could be added to the brackets to allow this to be customised (for example, to create a bit more space above the strings than elsewhere, or around a soloist, etc.)

The definitions for score orderings (orders.xml) could include information about where system markings should be duplicated by default, and this could also be included in the standard templates.

There are some quite sophisticated requirements for a proper system here:

  • to specify what types of items are to be duplicated or not (tempo markings, rehearsal letters/numbers, bar numbers, voltas, some other certain 'system text' markings like "G.P." or "lunga", large time signatures - if we ever get to implementing those)
  • when a system marking is updated or deleted, all the duplicates should update accordingly, but it needs to be possible to adjust the offsets or visibility of each instance independently too (and to reset local overrides)
  • we need a way to specify whether all the instances should be the same size, when appearing on differently-sized staves; in effect, a setting for items (and this would be useful for all text styles generally) between "absolute" and "scaled to stave", which has been discussed elsewhere
  • probably more stuff that doesn't come to mind right now

In reply to by oktophonie

I'm pretty keen to see than MU4 has at least some facilities in this area, even if it's not the ultimate solution.
Obviously we don't want to introduce something that we'd then have essentially discard as we move to a more fully-featured solution, but I don't think that should be a big issue. The key outcome is that on new orchestral scores score-wide performance directions automatically appear by default above the full score and the string section. Even if if that's not configurable other than a single score-style "Repeat System Text elements above lowest bracket" (or something similar), it's better than nothing.
BTW I don't really like the term "System Text" as it implies the text is somehow attached to the "system", but systems are artifacts of layout that are different between excerpts etc. Score-wide directions are logically attached to the "score", so why not just call it "Score Text"?

In reply to by bobjp

Well if it really was an option "repeat score-wide text above lowest bracket" it would possibly satisfy the OP's request. But I don't really think that's the ideal solution (and what would happen if your cellos & double-basses were bracketed together as well as the whole string section?)

In reply to by SteveBlower

Really the option applies to a group of adjacent staves, rather than a single one (hence the idea to possibly apply this option to a bracket rather than to a stave); and we could even have an option for "below" or "above" to cover the edge case where a user wants the markings below the bottom group.

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