Recent improvements in notation software have brought about some interesting phenomena. There was a brief item on Steve Hicken’s site Listen, where he mentioned that in the course of revising a piece, he found himself composing right in Finale, as opposed to sketching on paper. This is something I’ve been doing for a few years, although in my case using Sibelius, and I thought the process might be interesting to some readers.
Sketching without paper certainly takes some getting used to, but it’s worth it, given the amount of time saved. In Sibelius, I typically start with just a few staves and just sketch away. One nice thing is that you can decide what certain milestones in the piece will be, and put them in all at once, knowing that you can always insert as many bars as needed in between them. It helps the process knowing that here’s x material, and here’s y material, and I can just add measures as needed to make a transition.
If you’re writing for a film, or you’re concerned with timing for other reasons, it’s also handy to show the time code in your sketch, putting in empty measures between sections that are finished to make sure the timing is right.
When it’s time to flesh it out, I may just start adding instruments, and copying material from the sketch staves into their appropriate instrumental lines, or if it’s a larger ensemble, I may copy from the sketch into the real score in a different document. Sibelius makes copying and pasting very easy with its filters feature. For example, if you want to only copy the bottom note from a line consisting of block chords, you can do that.
In the former scenario, where you just build the sketch into the final work, the sad side effect is that there is no history of the creation of the piece unless you’re very disciplined about saving backups at various stages. I’m not very disciplined. I would like to see a future version of Sibelius incorporate some kind of version control system that stores the whole history of a file, and even lets you roll back to an earlier version if desired.
I’m glad I’m just old enough to have been trained in a world where handwriting on paper was the only option. I hope younger composers will continue to receive that training. But, not having to deal with paper makes composing much easier and more fun. I dare say that I would not have been able to accept my current project — 3 months to do a 15-minute piece — if it weren’t for Sibelius.
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