On Saturday night, Symphony Arlington (a city in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area) performed a woodwind quintet I wrote. In the audience Q&A before the performance, the other composer on the program said he never used notation software and wrote everything with pencil and paper.
I greatly admire the mental power he must have to do that. On the other hand, I wrote my piece in one day. His took two years, and he was on the stage before the show changing and correcting parts with the musicians.
There is no right or wrong in art, but the power of Dorico enables me to create a lot of music quickly and with few errors. I do not think I could ever go back.
The third composer on the program, Mr. Beethoven, could not attend the show so I did not get his opinion.
I, like many, back in the day had to use pencil and manuscript paper; early notation programs weren’t adequate (I even used a music typewriter once- a real PIA or india ink in my copyist days). I think that process has really helped me with composing in Dorico. You really had to think about what you wanted to do before committing it to paper.** Making changes later was not fun-plus we had the additional pain of copying out all the parts as well. I can create very good works fairly quickly and smoothly in Dorico because expressing my musical thoughts-and making changes to them-are easy in Dorico- and the parts follow suit. Plus, the only playback available was in my head.
As a former copyist, I have the utmost respect for the copyists who could make sense of his manuscripts-and, at that, either in daylight or by candlelight or oil lamp.
I was very kindly given the Bärenreiter limited edition facsimile of Beethoven’s opus 130/133 for Christmas three(?) years ago. At first glance it looks a frightful mess, but once one gets past that first impression, it’s wonderful just how clear everything turns out to be.
FWIW I can still only ‘think’ in paper and pencil (or pen). I’ve been using Finale since 2000 and Dorico from just a few months ago; but first I have to write a piece in manuscript. However, Dorico, Finale et al save an immense amount of money and time in the later stages of preparing scores for performance and publication.
I understand John Williams uses pen and paper because he has always been too busy to learn the software. On the other hand, he and his publisher no doubt have assistants to transcribe and prepare his work. If he’s too busy to learn software, I’m sure he’s too busy to copy out all the parts.
Back when I was at Berklee College in the late 90’s notation software was only starting to appear. Over the years I was in several ensembles that played a lot of student music written for projects and I was also a jazz comp major so I wrote my own music.
The one thing I noted was that in general every single time a composer walked in with good looking hand written music, ink on paper, the musicians would shut up and sit up and pay attention to the music much more so than if they got a piece of computer printed music.
To me it always just seemed like people respected the effort taken to create that sheet music and gave a bit more respect back, at least until they played the thing ('cause, you know, if it sucked it sucked no matter how it was printed)…
Anyway, it was something I always carried with me as an interesting aspect of being a composer and a musician.
Indeed. I have been exposed to computers and music software (both notation and DAWs) from a fairly young age. But there were some times (this is the privilege and luxury of not being a professional) when I would just sit down at my (electric) piano with a blank sheet of staves and a pen and take notes that way.
Notation software on the other hand allows me to load up a full orchestra and play around, every single futile arrangement fully legible, with no commitment as to handling a huge 26-stave sheet and having each measure be legible and pretty. So easy. So efficient.
However, I was recently decluttering a room; abandoned for reasons. From an armload of junk, out flew a scrap of paper. Two systems. A melody, a countermelody, the bass and what chords I had decided at that time. The cubase project is still on my hard drive, plug-ins missing, wrong drum-maps, lots of work to bring it back to a workable state. Yet the paper, the paper’s still there after 20 years or so, vaguely describing what would be.
I wish I had the composure and discipline to always sit with a pen and paper for exploration and to sit at my computer when the “work” begins.
My understanding is that he also does ‘sketch’ scores and has orchestrators to flesh it out. He will be studied (certainly should be) in academia along with other great composers, I’m sure. He certainly is one.
One of the things I really like about Dorico is the abiity to select an instrument’s staff and then experiment with ideas before committing them to notation. I still have and occasionally use commercial score paper and manuscript paper, and I’ll admit I like the feel of the pencil on the paper as I try to express the noises in my head. However, I find it much more satisfying to actually hear, rather than just imagine in my head, what those noises actually sound like. This is especially helpful when doing large or complex works. It’s still a quite “pencil and paper-y” approach to composition, I think. I still need an understanding of theory and compositional techniques to compose-regardless the manner of notating the results. Notation software still allows me to do this, but without the cramping and erasing of pencil and paper. Or having to separately copy the parts. Or re-write everything if a transposition is needed.
I think that observation holds true for comparing different computer printed music too. If I get a piece of music that looks good on paper, I’ll set my expectations of the music higher than if it looks to be prepared by someone who doesn’t care.
Agreed. When I was in high school and then college, I had to notate my scores on Aztec paper (thin onion-skin, and the thicker one cost more but was much more durable) using an ink pen and an electric eraser to deal with errors. I had many occasions where I burned an eraser-sized hole through the paper. I would then take the copy to a place on W. 54th street, literally across from Studio 54 (this was the 70’s and early 80’s) and pay to have a bound copy created. I still have those old scores, but finally went to pencil and manuscript paper that I’d then xerox; much cheaper, and easier to fix mistakes. As soon as I got a power mac I got a copy of Finale 3.2.1 and I never went back to manuscript paper again.
I still have a few works that remain in that form from the place on 54th street and that I never bothered to dump into Finale.
Here is the first page of an old work for violin and piano; I tried at one point to enter it into Finale and after spending probably and hour or more on this one page, I realized it was not worth it (especially as I’m not sure any violinist would play it). I wrote it back in 1980 when I was a freshman at the university of chicago and doing research into the origin of corn with George Beadle (the same guy who developed the one gene, one enzyme theory), and I dedicated it to him. Dr. Beadle showed it to a violinist who, as he related, got pretty freaked out when looking it over. It’s completely 12-tone and doesn’t sound anything like the minimalist works I started composing the following year.
