Q: How can I join several movements of a piece, which I wrote as individual Sibelius scores, together as a single Sibelius document?
A: Sibelius provides an “Append” feature, found in the File Tab:
Click the Append button.
…and choose the score you want to append in the dialog which opens.
Any appended score(s) must have the same number of staves as the initial score, and ideally the same instrumentation for the append to work.
If the number of staves doesn’t match, you will get an error message such as this one:
If the number of staves of a score to be appended matches, but the instrument definitions or names of the instruments to not match, you can still append it. However, Sibelius will give you a warning like this:
As part of the Append process, Sibelius defines the final barline of the first score as a section end with a page break by default.
Which may look like this:
The appended score is now stitched together properly, but will have some things that need to be cleaned up. Some common things that typically might need to be addressed are:
– a final barline at the end of the 1st movement
– remove cautionary time signature at the end of the 1st movement
– remove key signature changes before the start of the 2nd movement
– start subsequent movements with bar #1 again
These things can easily be done by using the “Tidy Appended Score“ plug-in, found in Home tab > Plug-ins > Other.
This plug-in will remove duplicates of repeating headers and footers, including instrument names which appear as a result of appending scores. The plug-in also can hide, delete or reset a number of other objects:
Reset bar numbers, Hide cautionary time signatures, Hide key signature changes, Hide clef changes, Remove instrument changes, Delete titles (apart from title pages), Delete redundant Composer, Lyricist and Copyright information. Restore Final or Double barlines.
… I get the following result:
A German version of this post („Partituren anhängen”) is available here.
Karin Vadon is a classically trained musician, singer-songwriter and music copyist from Vienna, Austria who authors a german-language music notation blog for Sibelius and Dorico users.
I have problem, that three Movements of the Symhony have the same number of staves, but the second Movement is only for strings and solo flute, instead of 12 staves, there are just 6 staves. How to solve this problem and to append the second Movement to the complerte score?
Hi Jiri,
I would give each movement exactly the same instruments and leave the six staves in the 2nd movement „empty“. This way you can join them all together. And then you can select all the music in the 2nd movement and choose „Hide Empty Staves“ in the Layout tab.
Best wishes,
Karin.
Thank you so much for the tips! Helped and saved me so much time.
That is great to hear, Kat. And thank you for letting me know.
My version of Sibelius doesn’t seem to have any plug ins. Where do I get them from?
Hi Antony,
do you have a full version of Sibelius?
Of course you can always add plug ins to the program, but the ones referred to here should be included by default.