h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I let the beginning of the month go by; I should have known there would be another NaJoPoMo this year but it slipped my mind. Pity, I did find it stimulating. Might slip in a few posts, unofficially. If I do I'll append them here.

Ah, it's all about encouraging people to write, so even if you officially missed the start it'd be lovely to hear from you.

Thank you for the encouragement! Might do a couple, bit busy today, these little carelessly tossed-off things tend to take me a while.

Gosh, the month is whizzing by with just the sort of whooshing noise Douglas Adams described as accompanying passing deadlines.

Sibelius, the music scoring program that I use professionally: http://www.sibelius.com

At the moment I am completing (still!) the layout for a new edition of Beethoven's Irish Songs, for publication in the Spring.

My first gripe with Sibelius was the way it knows better than you, and won't let you put in anything unconventional: things that to the program appear illegal, such as too many notes in a bar. This has improved over the years, but they generally send you round the houses to achieve what you want.

My second is the amount of extra stuff that has to initialise when you open the program, things that I never will use. Ideas Library? I don't even want to know what that is.

My third is the incredibly insane chord shapes that come up when you enter ukulele chord diagrams. These have clearly been designed by an orang-utan on hallucinogens, and require painstaking manual correction. I see no hope of this improving since the company has been sold to a group that does not share the original designers' interest in programming music scores.

The company was set up by twin brothers, the Finns (hence presumably their choice of the name Sibelius). They came up with the idea while schoolboys, and I can't help surmising that it arose when they noticed that the rules of musical scoring exactly model the kind of rules needed in all kinds of computer programming, making up a large but very strict algorithm.

Why would you want to put "too many notes" in a bar? I mean, there are side rules, like triplets and stuff, for putting in extra notes, aren't there? Or is this something about ukeleles?

I used Cakewalk for a few years to produce scores of works that are out of copyright. (Nowadays there are websites that produce these). Cakewalk was very limited in its abilities in the line of scoring - for example, if you had a quaver, crotchet, quaver, it insisted on writing the middle crotchet as two quavers tied together. From what I've seen of Sibelius, it is much more flexible.

My main gripe about Sibelius 4 was that it played a piece of music popularly know as "Sibelius 5" you started it up.

A L, that was the thinking of the Finns -- why would you want to put in extra notes? It was meant to help you notice mistakes. All very well till you want to put in an unmeasured melisma; either you have to set up a tuplet (triplet, quintuplet or whatever) or make a new temporary invisible time signature, then restore the original one. If you want to put in plainsong you may find yourself setting up a bar of 23 breves length. No, it's quite doable, just a long way round.

Hm. In my music classes, which was n decades ago, we would have treated melisma as grace notes or as a place for the musician to extemporize, like a cadenza.

Have you seen this? Funny riff on musical notation...
http://trumpetangst.tumblr.com/post/64216370126/musical-notation-as-described-by-cats

Yes it's true you can put in as many grace notes as you like, but even then I find I have to move them around afterwards for best spacing. Minor gripes. It's a fabulous program.

Update: the piano/vocal score of Beethoven's 72 settings of Irish songs is ready to go. I've shown it to a publisher and we are awaiting a response.

Beethoven included quite a few vocal cadenzas (examples of melisma) and I put them in as grace notes. I spent many a busy hour moving the notes around to make the spacing look good.