Unison notes with double stems - Add Unison?
I think this is related to a number of previous posts but poses a different question.
I have a choral piece with up to three parts on each of the Treble and Bass staves. In several places there are a few unison notes, which in the hand-written copy are indicated by a single notehead with up and down stems. I've read the suggestion of entering the same note in voices 1 & 2 so that two stems are displayed. However, this seems illogical given that the rest of the piece is easily represented with chords in voice 1.
On the Notes -> Add Interval menu is a command for Unison Above, which visually does nothing. Two questions:
1. Has this changed the internal representation, so that an additional note will be written to the file? (If not, why not!)
2. Could this command be used to produce a doubled stem, as required in the music described above?
Thanks
Steven
Comments
I believe the answer to #1 is yes, since you can then use the arrow keys and move that second note elsewhere. As for #2, I would have to imagine the assumption that a single voice has only a single stem is probably baked pretty deeply into MuseScore. It's also completely ingrained in centuries of music practice. One voice, one stem. Two voices, two stems.
What's more to the point is that you are using one stem to indicate two (or three, apparently) voices, which does happen to work in some cases if the vices happen to move together. And of course, that is not an uncommon situation. But it still is two separate voices, musically speaking, and should be represented as such. So that is why previous discussion has focused on adding the ability to make notes that really are in different voices nonetheless share a stem. So you'd still be entering music as multiple voices - since it really *is* multiple voices - but making them share a stem visually. I think that makes more musical sense than pretending your unison is a single voice but forcing it to have two stems.
Meanwhile, though, since entering those chords as separate voices and then aligning the stems is currently more work than one might prefer, certainly, entering them *as if* they were one voice makes sense. But then when you want to show that they really are two different voices, I don't see anything illogical at all about needing to actually enter them as the two different voices that they actually are.