I just had one devil of a time getting Benjamin Britten's "Festival Te Deum"
into Finale 2012. My purpose was getting the music into a rehearsal CD for my
choir, so playback, not appearance was the first order of business. The piece
is difficult because the organ accompaniment, in a large part of the piece,
grinds along in 3/4 time playing an ornament followed by a big chord with a
slight pause after the chord. Each organ event adds up to the time it takes to
play three quarter notes. The choral part, on the other hand, is written with
a very irregular set of time signatures, 5/8, 7/8, 4/4, 3/8, 2/4, and even an
occasional 3/4. The published music has all the bar lines lining up, but of
course, as actually played they rarely do line up.
I tried a couple of schemes to get different time signatures to apply for the
accompaniment, and some of them looked ok. None of them played ok. My final
recourse was to leave the irregular time signatures for the choir parts in
place for all of the systems and create a 3/4 time organ gracenote/chord/pause
for the first event, which I just drag copied over and over again, changing the
notes after the drag to match what Britten had written. It looked awful, but
played just fine. Occasionally the 3/4 measures containing the chords would
line up with the choir parts, but not very often.
Does anyone know how to convince Finale to show a different time signature for
different parts and still have it play correctly? Note that it HAS to play
correctly, appearance is secondary except that it simplifies entering the
notes, ie, I would have liked very much to have just keyed in the chords as
dotted half notes with a playable articulation for the pause rather than the
kludgy drag copy procedure I had to use which resulted in chords being tied
over bar lines with strange combinations of half note tied to quarter notes,
eighth notes tied to dotted quarter tied to quarter in the next measure, etc.
Clif Ashcraft
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