The hide staves or not to hide them? That is the question!

[NeeraWM]

I am working on a Romantic piano concerto. The original source is, as usual, the two-piano reduction and the orchestral parts (which include the solo piano). The only modern edition is from around the 1980-90s and uses a mix of show all / hide all / hide some that is sensible and makes general sense. The "hide some", though, is tricky because the strings are never hidden even when empty throughout the score.
Woodwinds and brass are hidden only as a group when none are playing (e.g., long passage of piano and strings) or shown as solo when one is soloing (e.g., piano, strings, and a lone wind or brass). This is in general coherent, I think.
Now, I was trying to do some "Frenching" (using the word without knowing why it is used to describe scores with all empty staves hidden) and I found that when hiding only the brass+timpani section and leaving the woodwind visible it allows for two systems on a page (5 mm stave size, 9.84 x 12.6 in or 250x320 mm page) but only if the top/bottom margins are reduced and the stave size is reduced to anything between 4.4 and 4.8 mm.
While this appears ok onscreen, when looking at a spread the different margin is not great, and I believe the different density of staves would not help the conductor understand what is happening.

Introductions done, I would like to know:

• is there a convention of when hiding or not hiding staves in the score? For example: should the piano solo grand staff ever be hidden? Should one hide single winds/brasses when empty or wait for the whole section to be silent?

• should the strings ever be hidden?

• what about the practice of showing empty staves the system before an instrument comes in? E.g., show empty brass before the upcoming tutti in the next page

There are so many possibilities and sometimes I wonder if one should hide staves at all in Romantic works where the ensemble is quite variable.
I would greatly appreciate your input.
Thank you so much and happy engraving!

[David Ward]

I think this depends largely on the individual score and on how much the instrumentation varies from system to system.

In my own orchestral scores, whose orchestration tends to vary considerably from system to system, I aim to hide all empty staves except where doing so will leave too few staves, whether full or empty, on a page.

[NeeraWM]

Thank you, David. So it doesn't bother you if you have a LH page with two systems, very compressed staves, and a RH page with all staves shown and a few of them empty because hiding them would not bring you any advantage?

[David Ward]

Something like that, yes.

[MichelRE]

I tend to leave empty staves on the page when instruments on those staves will be playing on the next page.
so let's say there are no brass before page 5, which is their first entry, I'll hide all brass staves (except page 1, which always shows the full orchestration) until page 4. On page 4 I will show empty brass staves, then on page 5 there will be notes on the brass staves.

I will again hide empty staves, though I tend to not leave empty staves AFTER a passage. So the second there are no more brass playing in my piece, their staves are hidden until one page before their next entry.

[NeeraWM]

Thank you MichelRE for this.
In the score I am working on, the Strings are never hidden even if empty, apart from a couple of systems over 120 pages.
It seems that the original engraver gave quite a lot of thought at the time to realise this.
I have tried a few more options and, in the end, hiding staves to make 2 systems fit into one page requires too much staff size and margins altering.
It eventually ends up looking like a mess. Besides, I find 5 (or 4.8 mm) quite the minimum staff size for orchestral scores.

[MichelRE]

@NeeraWM Yes, I also rarely hide any of my string staves.

Generally speaking, I prefer to have staves for each group of instruments (woodwinds, brass, strings) present, even if there's very little music there.

The only group of instruments I generally hide are percussion.

I just finished revising and re-entering into Dorico my first two symphonies, and the first of those has a lengthy cadenza for the solo flute, with punctuations in the strings every few bars. In this rare case I have two score pages of only one flute staff, and all five string staves. I even kept the string staves for the one system where they don't play at all, purely for consistency.

[OCTO]

For example: should the piano solo grand staff ever be hidden?

This I wouldn't recommend.  For other instruments, you can do it, but on the other side you have to be consequent, which is more difficult.

I just finished revising and re-entering into Dorico

Dorico?  Wow, congratulations!

[NeeraWM]

Dorico?  Wow, congratulations!

If I can, I'm starting most of my new projects in Dorico, unless I know something I need is too much of a pain to realise.
Otherwise, its note spacing is so much more reliable —i.e., things do not move on their own like in Sib— that it saves me tons of time.
Piano, vocal, most chamber music I do in Dorico.

Very big scores I did a 65-page symphony in the summer with condensing. It was everything but automatic or simple, but the final result was great.
I'm not sure I'm ready to risk a full-scale opera in it, but given Sib's degrading in performance when you have hidden staves (and an opera may require 100+ staves for all the condensing combinations), I may try one soon.
Sorry for the tangent, but you hooked me in!

[MichelRE]

Dorico?  Wow, congratulations!

I am completely converted to Dorico.
Even before the announced demise of Finale I would not have considered returning to it.

I have a relatively small catalogue, so re-entering things in Dorico is actually not all that hard (the two symphonies were the largest and most complex scores I have in my catalogue.)