Dennis, I'm new around this list and not familiar with your work, so forgive me for wondering if I've innocently stepped into an argument in progress?
The proportion of composers whose music is not accepted by us is very highly proportionally male composers too; you might also notice that we published Shulamit Ran and Melinda Wagner and Chen Yi and Ellen Zwilich long before they were famous because we believed in them, and that our rather sparse new home page flaunts the release of Hildegard von Bingen's large Ordo Virtutum, and that Hildegard Publishing Company has now joined forces with us - which as you know is the world's largest publishing company devoted to women composers. Likewise we more recently began publishing Stacy Garrop and Amy Scurria still in their 20's, and Julia Scott Carey when she was 16. We started working with them because they are good composers, that is, for the musical reason to publish their music. We don't evaluate composers based on whether they have radical notation - very few composers do these days, and that would be a silly way to decide important things; after all, Peters simply photographed Crumb's beautiful manuscripts. I'm wondering whether alternative notation is a specialty of yours, and I'd love to see it and learn how you get Finale to do radically alternative notation. I also sense having walked into a previous argument with someone else when you suggest composers caved about notation. That's not at all how I work with them. Richard Wernick likes indicating a 5-beat note by putting a rhythmic dot *before and after* a whole note, and so on for smaller values, and that's fine as a personal kind of exception and an example of the kind of elements that some composers do differently on purpose. We love and embrace this, when it has usefulness and significance. The kinds of things I'm talking about composers allowing us to standardize are conventions like slurs going over a whole tie rather than going just to the beginning of it, as some composers do in manuscript, or carelessly spelling a phrase with sharps in one measure and the same music in flats in the next. With more quirky composers like Shapey, we had a lot of good conversations about whether to use accidentals on every note including repeating pitches, or how to write out tuplets whose duration splits over a barline. And then there's piano notation where many composers have varying ideas about how hand division should be shown on two staves, and to what extent pedalled notes should be shown through ties in following measures. The process here is to go from what the composer writes down hastily making a deadline and eager to get to the next piece, to what the composer agrees is the best way for performers to read it. Composers love this because they always have the final say, and they get the benefit of a 2nd eye and critical thinking. (By the way, Shapey was not only strictly twelve-tone, but he used the same row in every piece for the last 20+ years of his life, and he wrote "(sic)" in the published editions whenever he needed a pitch to violate the row.) Dennis, I think I was being a constructive contributor to the dialog about composers and house styles, by sharing how one known publisher works shoulder-to-shoulder with composers to get results they like better than their original draft. That seems valuable to the Finale-list dialog and I hope it is interesting to many people who wonder about these things. Sincerely, Daniel Dorff Theodore Presser Company _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
