Whoosh. You've missed my point entirely. I'm talking about musical parts--not what staves will "look" like at a later point in order to conform to notation conventions. I write "a2" as a result. That is to say a result of a particular orchestration/instrumentation of the parts of a score. Because I embrace those kinds of musical concepts, I enter music part-wise and voice-wise. For me, "look in the score" is an afterthought to making a musical statement.
Yes, that's all fine. You're thinking about the musical result,
Yes, however it would be reasonable to conclude that a result will have one or more practical venues. Finale offers several output possibilities. To say that "look in the score" is an afterthought to musical essence isn't to say that it isn't thought about. But rather that it's one of the facets to consider in the course of producing results. Just as how a score can produce a sound output or output in other data formats.
so you enter things that way, and then you go through somersaults later with hidden notes and auxiliary staves to produce the secondary output of a printed score and parts.
You're making assumptions again. Saying "go through somersaults later" are your words. Not my attitude. Why would I use such techniques to my disadvantage?
But not everyone thinks that way when they compose. For that matter, not everyone uses Finale as a composition tool.
Already noted in my comment on David Bailey's post.
For many of us, a slight paradigm shift at the stage of entering the music (i.e., thinking a little more about how the score will look) allows us to save much labor down the road.
I've outlined a method which includes graphical output as a subset of the considerations. As it applies to modern thinking in music notation, "paradigm shift" was brought to the forefront by Max Matthews et. al. It is transcendent to that which you have been advocating and a precursor to the kinds of concepts which made Finale possible to be created in the first place. It is also _not_ a denigration of that which is traditional notation.
You might be thinking now about how much labor you'll save down the road by continuing your current habits. In the course of this thread you've been speaking consistently at the concept level which ensues from an ink and paper approach. But it seems to me that what you've been describing won't scale to that which I've been describing. That's because it's too much hardwired to "how the score will look" and doesn't consider for other output possibilities.
Considering how much both the composer's and copyist's toolkits have changed over the last 20 years, and these changes are the direct result of ideas enunciated by pioneers like M. Matthews, I'd say, one would be putting themselves on the endangered species list by not observing such concepts because they subsume traditional notation.
Philip Aker http://www.aker.ca
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