How well does the Score Editor work for contemporary classical music?
I think that Contemporary is the classical equivalent of modern sound design with synths and samplers; so, creating the sounds with Cubase VSTs would allow the contemporary composer to explore timbre in a really unique way.
HOWEVER, does the Score Editor allow the sheet music creation in the style of… for instance, the following examples?
Penderecki - Threnody for the victims of Hiroshima
Berio - Sequenza
Any contemporary music by Terry Riley, Pierre Boulez, Phillip Glass, Alfred Schnittke, etc.
Let me put it another way.
If I wanted to transcribe contemporary style compositions like the ones bellow, would the Score Editor be a good tool to achieve it?
Why would I choose Cubase for this task, in comparison to selecting Sibelius, Finale or even Dorico?
I have a VERY good reason: because Cubase makes it easy to create the sound. In my opinion, Cubase would offer a superior sound quality than any scoring software, because of its capability for sound design with synths and samplers. But, what about creating the actual printable score?
That’s where I need your help!
Please be as thorough as you like, provide examples, or references to specific functions that enable the user to create contemporary style looking scores.
I’m not familiar with this kind of notation and I don’t know if there is any specific notation software for such “oddities”.
Anyway I tried to reproduce Penderecki’s score (for fun).
A picture is worth a thousand words…
So see the attachment.
I wouldn’t say it’s easy or straightforward to do this in Cubase.
It is possible but it needs some manual work as the Score Editor won’t do it “automatically” for you.
Regarding the kind of scores such as Berio’s one in your example, well you’ll probably need a graphic program like Adobe Illustrator to create the graphics and import them into the Score Editor.
In a nutshell you can expand the boundaries of the Score Editor to fit your needs by doing some manual work, tweaking and creating graphics inside or outside the program .
But if you need to create such scores quickly, you would probably have to consider other dedicated programs.