At 12:21 PM 6/20/2007 -0500, Rob Deemer wrote: >The request for new topics plus the fact that there's a Mythbusters marathon >going on got me thinking about confirming or busting a notation myth. I've >heard many composers state that composing/arranging on paper with pencil is >not only preferable but artistically "better" than composing directly into a >computer notation application. >What are your thoughts?
I'll wade into your swamp, and try to get through it quickly this time. Nah, that won't happen. :) Background: I've been composing for forty-plus years, both dot-music and electroacoustics. I've composed about every way imaginable, except to play it into a computer (I don't play keyboard). My music has arisen from 'pure imagination', from algorithms, from chance, from images, from improvisation, from others' themes. I've built my own instruments to accommodate music that had no other way of being played. My first electroacoustic piece was written in 1969 -- and I do mean written, because it was four years before I had the electronics to render it. And my music is often composed before any of it is written down or rendered. That being said, it should be clear that 'composing directly into a computer notation application' is not quite how I work, but enormously valuable when that application is tamed -- when I know where it's going to fight back, and work around it in the initial stages, but only at the periphery of my mental activity. The process of composition is more than its notation, and more than even reading the score. It's visualization, too -- seeing the architecture, the density, the exchange. It's being aware of how the music breathes and how it feels. The first limitation of notation programs is their inability to reveal the items above. Even with a large screen, there's not enough present. Too much falls off the edges of the screen, too little music can be seen at once. And notation programs do not work like a pencil. The click and drag for a slur and a hairpin are the same gesture, but not with a pencil. They have different feelings, and the growth of the crescendo and the sweep of a slur different strokes. The click for an allargando and a forte are the same, for an accent and a staccato the same -- but the hand 'speaks' them differently, speaks them expressively. The artistic 'betterness' of paper, though, only arises from the limitations of the computer and the software. Were my screen also my desktop -- my real desktop, five feet wide and three feet deep -- and were the software responsive to any request (especially, for me, by drawing on the virtual paper), then I would give up paper. If that score could be written onto computer virtual paper and the results kept both as my handwriting and as a recognized and transformed perfect notation, then I would never need paper again. But those days are far off, if they would ever come. The economics of the 90% that David Bailey mentions are the reason -- fewer than 24 letters are on the software typewriter. One must grab a pencil to put the q and the x and the z in the manuscript. On the other hand, as noted earlier, one can plan for the software's limitations. Though I don't like it, I still can compose without artistic failure into Finale if time is critical (as it has been with my current project, cramming 85 (so far) commissions into a year). The music would be illegible without software, or at best my time would be drained away. In fact, I bought Finale after returning from living in Europe in 1992, vowing never again to spend a month as I did, missing the experience of living in Cologne, instead inking a score and parts for a piece that had already been composed in pencil. Would I expect the same of a student? I'm not sure. Being stuck in the past is no defense of my preferences. I like a pencil, but I also like a camera or an algorithm. From my point of view, each has is own compositional strengths, and no notation program can yet handle those compositional needs. Until I have that full-sized desktop and can drag a 3D photo of a piece of quartz into the score and apply an algorithm to it and then wipe my fingers across to reorganize what is there, then I'll keep choosing what works for each piece. Sometimes it's a pencil. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
