better control of instrument names for early music

Your idea

add local control of instrument names for early music where we insert plainchant that does not require labeling by voice type but uses an existing staff (and MS instrument) for convenience

Problem to be solved

In early music production, we need to manipulate what MS Studio considers an instrument to make a usable score and (especially for amateur/semipro choirs) playback purposes.

In Renaissance/baroque practice, polyphonic music/fauxbourdon or falsobordone alternates with chant: either the chant starts first, and even verses are in parts, or vice-versa; modern liturgical practice favors even polyphonic verses, odd chant, but this is most strictly required, and many composers set odds one way, even another, to be used on different occasions as desired.

I would like to choose to display names locally (just as you can locally hide or display clefs, time signatures, etc.) without removing them from the whole piece: by selection, or by system, or at least by section.

For example, in a Magnificat (or other psalm/canticle or even a hymn from the Divine Office or a polyphonic piece from the Mass or other services) that begins with chant, we tend to put it in the tenor instrument part, with the 8va clef, for musical (including historically informed performance) and practical reasons, but in practice, all lower voices could sing the chant, or the women can sing for variety; in scores of the Ordinary, we do the same for the chant incipit, but this is sung in liturgical contexts by the celebrant irrespective of the voice type (for Catholics, that could be a tenor or bass or even a countertenor, and it would be female voices in communities that have female clergy), it's just that we have to put the incipits somewhere, and the convention is the tenor part (who often sing these in concert settings, because it tends to fit the polyphony very well), and then we just use the tenor instrument for playback when we make practice tracks.

Right now, with the default options under Format -> Style -> Score, I see "T." before a chant line, and if it spans two lines, then I see "T." before both lines. If the SATB has two systems (virtually always the case) then the same thing occurs. But there's no need to display the T./Tenor before chant, and there's no need to repeat SATB (or whatever the voices are) in subsequent systems)

In other words, I want a local version of the current score-wide options. I have attached photos of the current output and edited them to show what I want (minus the long instrument names in the first polyphonic system: that was too much work).

The first polyphonic system has the short names, because the very first chant system has the long name, but I would rather have long names displayed for the first polyphonic system

Currently (this looks sloppy and unprofessional).

Something closer to what I would desire:

Prior art

Lilypond output does what I want e.g. Andreas Stenberg editions alternate chant (that's Lilypond's chant output) and polyphony nicely.

I haven't seen what Dorico can do. But [it looks like Dorico Procan do something like what I'd want.

Additional context

This is related to but not quite the same as https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/issues/18289 in that I want to hide instrument names, but selectively, instead of throughout a whole score, all while keeping the names n the Layout panel, Staff/part properties, etc.

Checklist

• This request follows the guidelines for reporting issues
• I have verified that this feature request has not been logged before, by searching the issue tracker for similar requests