Cutaway scores are a notation convention that emerged in the 20th century and are typically used in contemporary art music. In a cutaway score, staves do not appear in empty bars, leaving blank spaces on the page.
By contrast, in a traditional score, empty bars are shown for at least the rest of the system, maintaining a consistent pattern of staves across the page.
Dorico Pro allows you to produce cutaway scores automatically. You can also use manual cutaways to control how cutaways appear at specific positions.
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To indicate alignment between staves with simultaneous music in cutaway scores, you can input coordination lines.
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There are dedicated features for other ways of changing the number of displayed staves, including hiding empty staves for whole systems, condensing, divisi, and extra staves.
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Cutaways are never enabled in galley view or fill view. To see all staves without disabling cutaways in the current layout, you can switch to galley view or fill view.
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Cutaways cannot appear in layouts where multi-bar rests are shown.
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Bracket and barline changes do not appear on systems with cutaway staves.