From: fields@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Matthew H. Fields)
Subject: Re: Scoring
Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept., Ann Arbor
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1992 21:07:03 GMT

In article <1992Oct4.115852.1@vax1.umkc.edu> etishkoff@vax1.umkc.edu writes:
>anyway.  I use Cakewalk (sequencer) and since all my music is composed for
>synthesizer, there is simply no need to score it.

Great point.

>1. Score by hand (my writing is, though, is practically illegible).

Not hard to change imho.


>2. Use an inexpensive notation package to translate Cakewalk files into 
>notation.  Unless you are writing contemporary art music, you really don't
                                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^

or jazz or any music that takes a bit of detail to notate (exercise: transcribe
some of bartok strings perc and cel into your favorite notation program -- good
luck--or likewise throw in a mahler symphony---good luck--doesn't have to
be contemp art music to overwhelm the product or bring out all its basic
design flaws and downright errors in output).

>need all the bells and whistles of the expensive packages.  You might enter
>just the basics by computer (pitch, text... and fill in the rest by hand
>(including slurs).

some of those bells and whistles, like correct placement of the symbols
on the page, are essential if you're ever going to use the notation for
its intended purpose (communicating your intentions to another musician
fluently).

>3. Get a good notation package like Finale.  I have a number of friends 
          ^^^^ 

I'd use that term with a pillar of salt, not a grain.  Finale still
can't beam across barlines in any reliable way (*1), still can't
select noncontiguous selections of music not beginning and ending on
measure boundaries to modify, and still can't beam the sequence
eighth, thirtysecond (*1 again), sixteenth, thirtysecond correctly, no
matter what you do to it. (*2)

(*1: Measures are atomic structures of Finale.  Selections are
defined as contiguous rectangles of measures)
(*2: puts the broken beam on the wrong side of the stem.  Beams, like
staff groupings and bracketings, are implemented as flat lattices when
musicians use tree structures as their working paradigms)

>who use Finale and are very happy with it.  It is definitely not as simple
>or efficient to use as one would hope.  If you go into it, though, with
>the understanding that there is a significant learnimg curve involved, 
>you will likely have a good experience.

The learning curve was no biggee for me since I've got a degree in eecs (*3),
but it's also obvious to me that it's unnecessarily steep, mainly because
instead of going to music notation to develop a set of concepts and manuals,
the developers came up with their own terminology out of thin air and decided
to demand that the users learn IT.  The more I work with different notation
software, the more I encounter the attitude that the entire lore of notation
is supposed to be thrown aside for what's easy for a hothead to program,
and musicians are supposed to grin and bear it (*4).  Unfortunately, performers
have plenty of properly-notated repertoire to work on, so composers get stuck
holding the illegible bag.

(*3 BA, Oberlin, 85)
(*4 Norm at Coda told me that he was sure that the beaming Finale gave
for 8th, 32nd,16th, 32nd was correct, and it must just be that MY
expectations and knowledge of notation were faulty.  At the time I was
working on my doctoral dissertation in music composition.)

>4. Pay someone else to do it.  If you need something that really looks
>professional, there are plenty of composition, theory and instrumental music
>students who are whizes with notation software and who do scoring as a 
>business.  For a working copy you could follow choice 1 or 2 above.  If time
>is a factor or you are just too impatient to learn the intracies of a 
>complicated (and at times frustrating) notation package, find someone who
>already knows all the ins and outs.

This has much to recommend it--composers who don't know a lot obout part
notation might learn something this way.  But I spent $5000 doing the parts
for a symphony for symphonic band.  Realistically, this is out of the
reach of most folks, including me for the time being.

>I think it is too easy to accuse sofware writers of being lazy.

I disagree.  Where they need to start is: smart programmers and demanding
musicians have to work together on a team.  Score was produced by a frustrated
ex-composer whose knowledge of computing was limited to half of a freshperson's
FORTRAN class.  Finale was produced by some machine-smart folks with less
than half a concept of the way music notation is organized.  Both teams
expect the user to make up the slack.  If we users can take up the slack,
so can the engineers.

>  Scoring is
>an extremely complex task with more exceptions than rules.

I'll agree with that.

>  Imagine that all
>those exceptions were loaded into your notation package.  These programs
>are already big (and slow).
>  Would like to wait 15 seconds everytime you 
>enter a single pitch while the software searches through its exceptions
> list?   Pencil and stencil work faster than that. 

If you dig through Finale, you will quickly realize that a substantial
portion of the code--apparently about 90% of the code--deals with
things that are only needed for MIDI output.  But MIDI output is
handled better by sequencers like Cakewalk.  I claim that separating
these functions and getting the notation-to-midi output translation
code out of the program would compensate for the difficulties
resulting from building the notation code right.  For those who just
couldn't get by without playing back the music from notation, it
should be reasonable to pipeline or publish the data to a sequencer.
Right now, we're seeing integrated systems, kind of like SYMPHONY
before 1-2-3 became a separate product.  I'd like to see notation done
right, using midi for pitch input only, as a separate product from
sequencing, before we talk about integrating the two functions.

But I agree, stencils work fine for a lot of uses (I often do my clefs by
stencil).

Steve Reich got a mac just to use Professional Composer when it came
out, and many of his published scores were notated in P.C. on a dot
matrix printer.  They look like hell, and are really hard to read, but
once you've read one measure, you usually get */* or *//* for the next
5 to 32 measures, so you get plenty of time to repeat while decoding
the next glyph.  The product works fine for him, and his style
works fine with the product.  I ain't changing my musical style to fit
easily into a computer program, and I don't recommend that for anybody.
If the software fits your needs and budget, go for it.  If not, don't
let anyone shame you into 'modernizing'.

Obviously, sooner or later the user has to give in and learn something.
In order to use Microsoft Word, you have to know how to type, for instance.
But imagine Word wouldn't let you use lowercase letters. Or even better,
suppose Word wouldn't allow you to write a sentence longer than two
lines of text, without putting a spurious period in the middle.
Or suppose that getting your text correct in scroll view virtually
guaranteed it'd be formatted wrong in page view and vice-versa.
Finale has problems equivalent to both of these (its so-called
'smartshape' octave, pedal, and slur markings are limited to 2
systems, "due to a bug in PostScript" according to Norm; line-break
formatting isn't cached separately from scroll view, so ties, horizontal
placement, accidentals, and a plethora of other things break when
you insert or delete measures, or change views---so you are essentially
forced to develop the score in scroll view, switch to page view, and
fine-tune the page layout---and once you've done that, never go back
and edit the music itself).  C'mon, folks, you wouldn't stand for that
even from WordStar 1.0 ca. 1983.



x-gateway: rodan.UU.NET from love-hounds to rec.music.gaffa; Tue, 6 Oct 1992 09:55:39 EDT
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 09:41:16 -0400
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