reference.book Page 183 Monday, August 31, 2009 2:47 PM
2.29 Staves
Deleting staves permanently If you want to get rid of a staff (and any music on it) permanently, choose Create Instruments (shortcut I), select the staff (or staves) you want to delete from the Staves in Score list, and click Delete from Score, then click OK. Alternatively, you can triple-click on a staff in the score to select it throughout, then hit Delete.
The staff size determines the size of everything in the score. If you double the staff size, all text, lines and so on will double too. If your score looks too cramped or spaced out, you can alleviate this by changing the staff size; 8.6 Document Setup.
Small staves To make a staff go smaller than other staves, choose Create Instruments, select the staff in question in the Staves in score list, and switch on the Small staff checkbox, then click OK. By default, small staves are 75% of normal size, but you can adjust this on the Staves page of the House Style Engraving Rules dialog (shortcut Ctrl+Shift+E or E).
Staves with gaps in Penderecki, Stockhausen and some other contemporary composers like to have no staff lines in bars where an instrument isn’t playing. This gives scores a scrap-book (sometimes called “cutaway”) look, with passages of music dotted about on the page. In choral music, preces and responses are often written similarly. This is easy to achieve in Sibelius using instrument changes, as follows: First, preferably switch on View Hidden Objects (shortcut Shift+Alt+H or H) if it’s not
already switched on; instrument changes will now appear as gray rectangles (with this option switched off they don’t appear at all!) Select the passage of music during which you want the staff lines to disappear: for example, if you want them to disappear at the start of a bar, select that bar; if you want them to disappear after a particular note, select that note. Extend the selection to the point at which you want the staff lines to reappear again using Shift- (hold Ctrl or to extend by whole bars). Choose Create Other Instrument Change. In the dialog that appears, set Choose from to All instruments, Family to Other, and then select No instrument (hidden) from the list of instruments. Click OK and Sibelius creates two instrument changes: at the start of the selection it creates an instrument change to No instrument (hidden), hiding the staff lines; and at the end of the selection it creates an instrument change back to the original instrument. In case Sibelius didn’t position either instrument change precisely to your liking, you can select the gray instrument change rectangle and nudge it left and right with the / keys (with Ctrl or for larger steps), or drag it with the mouse.
Creating an incipit Although the incipit of a piece of music must strictly speaking refer to its first few notes, incipits occur in many types of scores, typically as a short fragment of music preceding the first full system, often indented both at the left- and right-hand sides of the page. 183
Notations
Staff size