Flat slurs

[LupusCaeruleus]

Your idea

Add an alternative style for slurs so that they can have a flat top, as shown in the images below.

Problem to be solved

When spanning very long phrases, the common arc-shaped slurs creates a lot of vertical space, resulting in an unpleasant appearance and a waste of page space.

To illustrate, here are the first few bars of Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit: When recreating the score in MuseScore, extra spaces generated by slurs are quite noticeable:

Note that adjusting handles is not helpful because when the height of the slur is reduced, its ends will become too flat.

Prior art

Lilypond supports custom slur shapes, but actually requires manually specifying every control point of the slur as a Bézier curve. (So it is also possible to create slurs with multiple turning points, but with a lot of effort.) Dorico has a style setting to "flatten" the slurs.

Additional context

No response

[irwir]

Left-click on a slur line shows grips that could be dragged and thus change the curve.

[LupusCaeruleus]

Left-click on a slur line shows grips that could be dragged and thus change the curve.

Yes and I am aware of this, but adjusting the handles/grips is still not able to yield a satisfactory shape. (See my last screenshot and comment above, note that the top left and top right handles have been pulled as far as they can go on either side, but the ends of the slur are still too flat.)

[worldwideweary]

P.S. Fwiw this feature has been asked for ~10+ years such as https://musescore.org/en/node/56446.

[irwir]

Thanks for clarifications. Apparently, choice between yet another kind of slur or addittional grips is not that great, and this could explain why nobody rushed to implement this feature. Maybe an alternative should be considered? If slur line is very long and flat, automatically make ends slightly more curved.