About the Composer

I hope this information will be obsolete within a few days, but having done the research, I’d like to help out any other Mac/Sibelius users out there.

If you’re upgrading to Leopard and still using Sibelius 4, you’ll need to get a compatibility patch from Sibelius. Unless, that is, you don’t need to be able to, uh, open and save files.

If you’re upgrading to Leopard and using Sibelius 5, and prefer not to have it crash upon startup, you’ll need this compatibility patch. Also, Sibelius has a suggestion for you if you’re experiencing screen redraw weirdness.

If you encounter strange screen redrawing behaviour during mouse input on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, e.g. when moving the shadow note over the staff, choose Sibelius > Preferences, go to the Textures page, and switch on Alternative texture drawing.

But the big one, that’s making me think twice about rushing to get Sibelius 5, is that none of the Sibelius Sounds installers work. More on that here.

I’m confident that Sibelius will sort all of these things out very quickly, though. They’re good.

The sewer project has turned out to be a complete fiasco. It now appears that my studio is going to look like this for at least a couple more weeks.

Meanwhile, I’d been revising Letter To Hungary for its upcoming second performance, and the parts are just about due. I’ve been forced to work at my desk, where I do have Sibelius, but it’s not hooked up to any playback gear.

Yes, over the past four years or so, I’ve become spoiled by Sibelius playback. Fortunately, it’s mostly about tweaking dynamic markings and orchestration, so there’s really no need to play anything back, but today I did grapple with one very important passage that needed some relatively elaborate reworking. It was a struggle, but I got it done.

I’m not sure how I feel about this phenomenon with Sibelius. I was never one of those geniuses who writes everything in his head, but I did use to be able to accomplish a lot without being able to play back what I was writing. You know… back when it was pencil and paper. In cases where I needed to hear how harmonies progressed, I would plonk it out on the piano. But here’s the thing: I’m not a good pianist, and I rarely write for piano. Sibelius playback has saved me countless hours trying to work out composition problems by playing back exactly what’s on the page instead of the best my fingers can accomplish.

If my inner hearing has suffered, other aspects of composing have improved. Writing for strings, for example, was enhanced I think because Sibelius lets me think orchestrally. Also, I work much more quickly now than ever. I’ve learned to get my ideas down without agonizing over whether they’ll work. I play back frequently and do trial and error and triage until the problems are solved.

As for my revisions, I’m mostly satisfied. I had shown the piece to my former teacher (thanks, C.S.!), who had some wonderful suggestions. One in particular I simply can’t pull off under the current circumstances, which I regret.

After this, I’m just holding off on composing until I get my room back. I guess I’ll catch up on paperwork

Yesterday music notation software maker Sibelius announced that they were acquired by Digidesign��, maker of Pro Tools�, and whose parent company Avid also owns M-Audio�. In the official press release, both companies seem to emphasize the educational possibilities of the merger, which is good.

As for new products that may result, the idea of some future hybrid of Sibelius’ current notation software and Pro Tools is tantalizing. I already use Sibelius for everything. (When I tell this to people in film scoring circles, they look at me like something’s hanging out of my nose.) It would be handy to be able to incorporate synchronized audio, for example, into a piece notated in Sibelius without having to dump it into another audio/MIDI sequencing program.

I love Sibelius to pieces, so I’m looking forward to seeing what new products, if any, emerge from this new relationship with Digidesign.

So, as of yesterday, Letter To Hungary is now out the door, delivered electronically to a printing store in Budapest. (See, I keep telling people: the internet is good for some things.)

Turns out, generating parts using Sibelius 4 has not been the Hamptons clambake I’d anticipated based on the hype. (Don’t get me wrong; I loooove Sibelius.) Also, the piece is so busy that for the first time ever, I’ve had to deliver a set of parts without a solution for every pageturn problem. I’m not an orchestral player or a professional copyist, so I simply couldn’t figure out how to get it done. Tips and tricks are welcome here.

Here’s a first pass at some brief program notes. (more…)

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.