NOTATIO

Thanks teacue for showing this. It looks as if Dorico has thought it out well. Not having tried the program I couldn't tell if it works better than Finale or not, but it looks promising.

Can you change the settings for the curves and slopes of slurs too in Dorico?

I too am an admirer of Schnabel's playing, but I'm not sure that I followed you there. Do you think that he played the 'exordium' too fast or too slow?

A very interesting comment, Vaughan! As for Sokolov knowing about this, I'm not sure, so I'll place no bets there.

I agree on both your points, John. My examples were, as you guessed, defaults with different settings - in fact they were meant to illustrate these settings only.

I notice that I skipped one option for slur interaction: 'ignore'. Perhaps because it sounded a bit like "Just ignore it!" And the result is, well, in any case not overly pedantic.

I've found it useful to have two versions of staccati (at least). One where the slur interaction is set to 'always inside' - for portati and one-bow staccati as in A below. One set to 'auto inside/outside' - for situations as in B. The 'auto' setting does not work with portati as in A, though, as sh...

While the settings I tried in my last post may work for pairs of notes, they don't for groups of three or more notes: Sorry. Clearly Finale could have had more granular settings for slurs.

I too am rather sceptical to Gould's recommendations, so I did some experimenting with the settings for the slurs placement: Slurs positioning 1.PNG In this example the settings for the vertical start and end points are: Smart Shape placement above.PNG Smart Shape placement under.PNG - and of course...

I see. Thanks for the clarification, John.