It’s a bit off forum, but can’t keep for myself.
This morning I’ve ordered Eleine Gould’s book, what gives me a great opportunity not only to learn what is ‘behind bars’ but also what is ‘behind Dorico’, yay!
It’s a bit off forum, but can’t keep for myself.
This morning I’ve ordered Eleine Gould’s book, what gives me a great opportunity not only to learn what is ‘behind bars’ but also what is ‘behind Dorico’, yay!
Elaine Gould’s book has certainly been one influence on Dorico’s design, but it’s not the only book on the developer’s shelves.
It’s an excellent reference, certainly; though of course it has its origins as “the Faber Music style guide”, and they tend to deal in specific genres, and are UK-based.
You’ll find that every publisher, country and genre has its own ways of doing things – it’s a wonder that anyone can read any music at all!
It is quite excellent and thorough, but there are some issues where she is a bit out of the mainstream or historical trends. There’s also not a single chord symbol in the book so if you do any sort of work in jazz, commercial, or musical theater genres you’ll almost certainly want to supplement with other books as well. I would consider Music Notation by Gardner Read, The Art of Music Engraving and Processing by Ted Ross, and Music Notation in the 20th Century by Kurt Stone all to be essential texts along with Gould. These are all available to be legally “borrowed” at archive.org too (at least in the USA), if you want to check them out before purchasing.
As @FredGUnn says so well, there are many other books than Elaine Gould’s.
However, I’ve come to wonder whether this kind of book is really useful for us, because software like Dorico (alongside other leading music-engraving softwares) embeds most of the writing conventions that we don’t have to worry about. And there are plenty of settings that will allow you to find what your eye is used to through frequent contact with scores from the major publishers (Bärenreiter, Breitkopf, Schott, etc.).
Of course, we may want to change all the default settings in order to obtain the most horrible score imaginable, but if we do, it’s because we wanted to.
Finally, as far as the notation specific to contemporary music is concerned, these books will be of no use whatsoever, since the composer’s preferred graphic appearance will then be the law.
Just thinking out loud….
These books are somewhat like style guides — not everyone agrees on how to do certain engravings (e.g. 8va or 8vb). I remember submitting papers where professors required those papers to follow different style guides – as if each one were the absolute and only way to do something. (OT—See June Casagrande’s Grammar snobs are great big meanies for a realistic view of differing points of view!)
But wouldn’t it be nice if we had “simple” selection macros that would follow major publisher’s styles or conventions without having to pick and choose from all the options that Dorico allows — at least as a starting point. So, like “set to factory default,” we could “set to Gould” or “Bärenreiter.” (Maybe someone more familiar with the details, and able to write scripts, could set up something!
–Jim
Personally as someone who never went to music school and is entirely self taught, I have found it to be a wonderful edition to my bookshelf and I reference it on a regular basis, for things which a composer/orchestrator/arranger must still decide.
Of greatest help to me has been stuff like understanding how to format div. vs. unis., desks, soloists, cadenzas, and some more nuanced and specific instrument notations such as for harp and percussion. And other various notation choices. There’s a decent guide to aleatoric stuff toward the end, too. I could guess and assume based on studying scores, but this is sometimes all over the place and thus more confusing. And most of these things Dorico can’t decide for me (e.g., if I want one string player playing arco an octave higher, and all the others (gli altri) playing an octave lower, but pizz… that’s a creative decision I must make and Dorico doesn’t have a way of automating this. I can guess and hack my way through or get a professional answer within 5 seconds from that book!)
I don’t agree with Gould on every page though, and I look forward to adding the Stone book to my collection in the future (for percussion I also have " How to Write for Percussion" by Samuel Solomon which I recommend for anyone writing a lot of advanced percussion stuff!). But I would say I’ve definitely gotten my money’s worth having a professional reference guide at a hand’s reach any time I hit a snag, uncertain how to format something.
I think notation guides are definitely useful! Dorico’s defaults are good, and they try to “idiot-proof” the notation a little bit, but there are still plenty of things I disagree with. I think my first day using Dorico was mostly spent not learning how to input, but how to change defaults I didn’t like, LOL.
Having a wide perspective of various approaches and how they have changed over time, is definitely helpful though IMO.
Yes and no. Obviously much contemporary notation straddles the line with being visual art too at which point a copyist or publisher won’t be changing much. But knowledge of contemporary techniques certainly can allow the copyist or publisher to recommend various notational devices that performers may already be familiar with, so the composer isn’t reinventing the wheel unnecessarily.
After a whole book of some wild notational ideas and quotes, John Cage concludes his book Notations (1969) with this quote:
For those interested in graphical notation, that Cage book can still be found relatively inexpensively. Theresa Sauer did a 21st century version of it called Notations 21 that is wonderful and amazing, but insanely expensive now. A little gallery guide to an art exhibit in the 1980s called Eye Music: The Graphic Art of New Musical Notation is very cool and not that expensive, but quite hard to find. (It also has a great essay on notation by Hugh Davies.)
Yep, I’ve got that one too. Very useful guide and well worth it for anyone frequently dealing with percussion notation.
Composers would never…
This seems a bit complicated to do (and a bit of a ‘gas factory’).
But I agree with you that, like @FredGUnn, I don’t like some of the choices Dorico has made (that famous tie on the 2nd beat of a 4/4 replacing a dotted quarter note, which confuses a lot of users, because Dorico is the only music engraving software to correct input on this point); some options need to be reviewed, indeed. The good thing is that it’s possible.