Hello all, first post here I think. I am pretty much a summer-only (northern hemisphere summer, that is) composer as I teach full-time during the academic year, a grueling schedule. I just thought I would get my completed works up on the new board here: all two of them! (three counting the strings-only version of my Op. 2, a symphony whose ending has given me no end of headaches over the past 4 years. But that will be for another post.
I began this Quartet as a student in July 1975 at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor under William Albright. As the end of the summer approached, I couldn't figure out how to end it, so I gave it a throwaway ending and shelved it. After graduating in 1977 I returned to my original major, physics, and stopped composing altogether after a year or two. I knew nothing of notation software until late 2019 when I discovered MuseScore and used it to resurrect my old score and try to fix some errors and work out the ending. I quickly realised that it didn't need an ending, at least not quite yet. Instead I added an intense development section, an ultimately tender recapitulation, and a searching coda, mainly for solo viola. I made a couple of changes after abandoning MuseScore in favor of Sibelius with NotePerformer, but I consider it finished at this point.
All that to say that if you heard this piece in the last couple of years on the old board, there is no need to re-listen, I don't believe I made any changes since then. The score and rendering are from mid-July of last year. They're on Google Drive, which in my experience is an awfully unreliable playback device. I recommend downloading the MP3 and playing it back on the player of your choice. Playing time is about 16 minutes.
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they are section violins, not solo as that's where you said the problem is. And I have neither Sibelius sounds nor Halion installed (anyway NP is my Dorico default playback template) so both are definitely NP and both use absolutely default settings in both programmes.
Then it must be something in my Dorico settings that is causing this, or else it's perhaps a side-effect of the MIDI message I'm sending to NP to reduce vibrato depth - that's non-negotiable though, the default vibrato in NP is horrendous, especially for solo strings.
I'll try importing the quartet this weekend via .musicxml, and listen to the tremolo passages with only default settings, then add the MIDI messages if it plays back correctly. Hopefully I can isolate the problem that way. Thanks for your help with this.
I agree entirely on vibrato depth -- I always reduced this to around 30-40 in NotePerformer when I used it regularly in Sibelius. For this particular test, though I didn't change anything. Will be interesting to see what your investigations come up with.
Well, I can confirm that in THIS score, tremolos play back more or less correctly - that is, when they play back at all. I encountered at least one tremolo chord in the violins, played sul pont, that was imported correctly as far as the eye could see, but which played back as not tremolo, but straight senza vibrato. By fiddling with the 2nd violin part - basically, first removing a MusicXML artifact (a spurious lower voice consisting entirely of rests), and then copying and pasting one voice from the 1st violin part onto the 2nd violin and then adjusting the pitch, I was able to get the chord to play back tremolo. Mind you, there is NO apparent reason why this should have had any effect, and almost certainly points to a software bug, but whether the bug is in Sibelius's MusicXML export or in Dorico, I have no idea.
I made it up to letter D in porting the score into Dorico - corrected all the tempo markings at least - but still have so many outstanding issues in those first 50 bars, that I'm going to have to put this project on indefinite hold as preparations for the fall semester are getting more and more demanding. Classes start next week, so I'll be only an occasional visitor here after that until the end of November, when we get a week off for the Thanksgiving (US) holiday.
in Dorico, playing techniques need to be specifically listed otherwise they may not play back. So for instance if you combine senza vibrato, sul pont and tremolo, if this triple combination is not listed in the Expression Map then Dorico may just stick to what it had before or even go back to the default (natural). The NotePerformer map has more combinations than most (certainly more than any of my own maps) but it cannot cover everything. The trouble is that the NP map is so obscure, it's very difficult to edit it. Fortunately, it's not often rally necessary.
It seems your day job doesn't allow much time for anything else which is a shame but as long as you enjoy it! Although my productivity has increased very significantly since I stopped paid employment, I did at least manage to produce a couple of (usually substantial) works a year on average, though I did have quiet periods when I spent more time with other interests like photography.
I don't think there is anywhere in my score that I combine three different special techniques like that - certainly not here. There is no senza vibrato, it's just sul pont, and tremolo. Until I made a meaningless edit to the score, the system was substituting senza vib for what I notated - and the notation was correct. Again: my edit left it absolutely unchanged. Should have done nothing... but it caused it to play back correctly, as if by magic. That's either a very obscure feature or, more likely imo, a software bug.
I do enjoy teaching, wouldn't be doing it if I didn't love it. That said, the administration has been imposing some onerous requirements on us lately that make it considerably less fun and more stressful. Not enough to make me think seriously about retirement - at least not yet.
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