User manual

The following sections give you an overview of the design philosophy as well as concepts on
which Dorico Elements is based.
We recommend that you familiarize yourself with these concepts as these are often returned to
throughout the documentation.
Design philosophy
If you are experienced with other scoring applications and are interested in learning more about
deep design considerations for scoring programs, you may nd the following discussion
illuminating, but everybody can safely skip it.
Dorico Elements has a forward-thinking design that is led by musical concepts rather than
computational convenience, and this provides many benets.
Higher-level concepts
In most graphically-orientated scoring applications, the highest-level concept is the staff or the
instrument denition that creates a staff or staves. When setting up your full score, you start by
adding the correct number of staves, and you are immediately forced into making decisions
about the layout. This means that you must know in advance whether two utes share a staff or
have their own individual staves, or whether there should be two trumpets or three. Many of
these decisions have signicant effects throughout the process of inputting, editing, and
producing individual instrumental parts.
Typically, every system of a score must contain the same number of staves, even if some are
hidden on particular systems. This requires the user to manage common conventions for
themselves, such as multiple players of the same instrument sharing staves. This can be time-
consuming and is naturally error-prone.
Dorico Elements is designed to conform more closely to how music is performed in the real
world and to make the score a exible expression of the practical choices that go into a musical
performance, rather than to make the musical performance subservient to the way the score was
initially prepared.
To that end, the highest-level concept of Dorico Elements is the group of human musicians that
performs a score. A score can be written for one or more groups, for example, a double choir or
an orchestra plus off-stage chamber ensemble, and so on. Each group includes one or more
players which correspond to the humans who play one or more instruments. Players may either
be individuals who can play more than one instrument, for example, an oboist doubling cor
anglais, or groups in which everyone plays only one instrument, for example, eight desks of
violinists.
The actual music that is played by the group in your score belongs to one or more ows. A ow is
any span of music that stands alone, for example, a whole song, a movement of a sonata or
symphony, a number in a musical show, or even a short scale or exercise. Players might or might
not have any music to play in a given ow. For example, all the brass players might be omitted
from the slow movement of a classical symphony, or certain players might have nothing to do in
Dorico Elements concepts
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