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Music Engraving: SCORE, Sibelius, Finale


Despite the pretentiousness of the term, "music engraving" is simply the process of typesetting music on the computer—"typing it in" so that it looks pretty.

The term originally referred to the process of carving musical notes, lines, and objects into metal plates—literally engraving—but even though everybody uses computers now, the term stuck. Though more opaque than "typesetting," most serious music typesetters prefer to call themselves "engravers" because it reflects the skill and craft that is required to professionally set pieces on the computer.

Unlike typing an essay into Microsoft Word, the process of reading a composer's manuscript and creating a finished score is far from simple. The musical engraver is expected both to standardize notation (this can include everything from minor beaming changes to changing time signatures, respelling chords, changing the distribution of instruments on the staves...) and help the composer eliminate any ambiguities that may exist on the page ("Is that flute line for both flutes or just one? Is that trumpet note still muted? Strings are arco again in measure 143?"). The goal, of course, is a perfectly formatted score and parts, ready for easy performance with a minimum of rehearsal.

(A good set of score and parts really can reduce rehearsal time: simple things like courtesy accidentals where the performer is likely to second-guess the composer's intentions make a huge difference, and obviously cues will help an orchestral performer avoid getting lost while sight-reading a piece. In these days of ever-decreasing rehearsal time, every minute is worth saving!)

Often, the engraver works with a publishing house to ensure the score fits with its style-sheet. Far more than just "typing the piece into the computer," a music engraver is a true designer and graphic artist.

I engrave scores for composers or arrangers, producing high-quality output with a (relatively obsessive) eye for detail. For quality of printed output, nothing beats the SCORE Music Publishing System, used around the world when it is important a score be instantly understandable with a minimum of thought. However, I am also an expert user of Sibelius and Finale, which can provide other advantages (MIDI playback, for example).

My rates vary depending on the complexity of the music, legibility of the manuscript or score, and time pressure. Scores are generally charged by the finished page, or, sometimes, by the hour; orchestra parts are almost always charged by the finished page. Contact me at jeffrey@jeffreygrossman.com to discuss your project and get a quote. I enjoy working on everything from simple pieces for soloists to full-length operas, and the process of getting to know the individual styles of composers is an added bonus for me. As a practicing, highly educated musician, I bring my performing experience to your scores.

Here's my sample packet [10 pages, 1.1 MB], demonstrating a range of idioms including:

Why SCORE Is So Great, or, Why I Switched
by Jeffrey Grossman

I have always done some computer engraving when the occasion arose: it appeals to my impulse (mild compulsion?) to organize and bring order to messy situations. I began in Finale, but in 2002 switched to Sibelius the moment someone proved to me that it could produce professional output. (In fact, I believe Sibelius's output is generally superior to Finale's, just because I find Sibelius's font more pleasing to the eye.)

Lately, however, I have grown less and less satisfied with Sibelius. I began to feel like I was constantly fighting the program to do what I wanted: slur a certain way, organize the notes exactly according to my internal image, etc. Every thing you click in Sibelius affects other objects—this is supposed to "intelligent" and "helpful" of the program, and occasionally it is. Many times, though, you notice a note needs just a little more space, and you want to just move it over, but oops, there goes the whole measure, reflowing onto another line, messing up your careful line placement, for example. Let's not even talk about the default horizontal positioning system in Sibelius, which is frighteningly stupid. Well, okay, let's talk about it. Every object gets space, even if it doesn't need it. Let's see an example. (It's best if you just stare at the examples for a few moments.) (footnote)

Do I even need to say anything? Can you guess which one is Sibelius? (If you don't see a difference in the spacing, you should probably just close your browser and walk away.) What is Sibelius (the upper example) doing?! Is there any reason that the dotted sixteenth-notes in the upper line need to be so unevenly positioned? How about the quintuplet in m. 3?

I don't really know how Sibelius can do this so badly, but I hope you'll agree that SCORE's engraving is clearer—I can't take credit for that; it's thanks to the superior algorithms behind SCORE's spacing—and isn't that what you would want?

SCORE also gives us additional stylistic options, like the stemlet rest in m. 3, right hand. (I personally like to use stemlet rests when they can help eliminate an ugly triplet bracket, but obviously this is entirely customizable.) (N.B.)

SCORE's philosophy about spacing, basically, is that many objects shouldn't necessarily make all the music move unless there isn't already enough space there for them. So an accidental added to the middle of a line should just get added in, not destroy even spacing of even notes. This is noticeable even in the simplest of triplet lines, so imagine the cumulative results of thousands of these lazy Sibelius calculations!

SCORE's basic note font is also—in my opinion—more clear and somehow more "solid" than Sibelius's or Finale's. Look at the example above. Sibelius's noteheads are too round and its beams somehow gangly. SCORE's darkness allows for slightly smaller staff sizes with improved readability, meaning the music fits into fewer pages with no loss in performance ease.

On the technical side, SCORE allows the engraver absolutely exceptional and unparalleled control over every item on the musical page. While Sibelius and Finale allow a few editing points for a slur, for example, you can manipulate all 19 of SCORE's slur parameters by eye with the mouse, numerically with the keyboard, or even group edit all the slurs in a document in sophisticated ways, allowing complete consistency throughout a score. Though this appears to take longer than the point-and-click "modern" input method, in the end it saves endless amounts of time because the engraver have to fight the program to make the slur look perfect. When I see a slur colliding with an accidental, I can just adjust exactly the part of the slur that needs to be changed (increasing its curvature slightly, moving its center in minute ways, manually adjusting the shouldering values, etc.) instead of the endless click-and-drag annoyance we have all gotten accustomed to.

The other part of SCORE that seems at first counter-intuitive is that nothing changes unless you want it to. For example, if I took our example above and I changed one note in Sibelius, the rest of the linewould move. (Doesn't matter which note.) In SCORE, on the other hand, absolutely nothing would change except the note I touched, in exactly the way I wanted. I could turn the first left hand note of m. 3 into a whole note, and nothing would move. It seems ridiculous at first, but the implication is that I always know exactly what my actions will accomplish.

This feels at first like a lot of extra work. And admittedly, in some cases, it may mean some extra time. But consider a situation like this:

This was done in Sibelius, and pretty much every word and hyphen here was pushed or pulled manually in some way to make the line readable and still fit into such a small space. If I noticed that there were a wrong note here (I don't think there is) and changed, for example, the first tenor B to a C, the entire line would be destroyed: extra space created there, notes moved later in the line and earlier, words out of alignment, hyphens completely awful... it is frustrating and time-consuming to have to re-do that sort of manual work, and you are never convinced at the end that it's quite as good.

Imagine that work for, say, 371 hymns.

And remember that in SCORE, I could have made the one correction necessary and nothing would have moved around it.

At the end of the day, engraving is about printed output. MIDI playback can be very useful and electronic music is great, but personally, as a typesetter and a musician, I want to quickly and correctly read a printed musical score for performance or study. With enough time and effort, Sibelius and Finale are both capable of professional output, but it takes a lot more work than people realize. The advantages of their graphical, mouse-driven interfaces become disadvantages as soon as you realize you will need to manually adjust every tie of a 200-page orchestra work so that they look right to you. SCORE is not simple or fast at all, but the nearly limitless flexibility it provides makes it the best choice for consistently professional output in a reasonable amount of time.

(The original version of that triplet example is here; I can't remember how I found it, but it's clearly from an older version of Sibelius, and badly pixellated Aren't you glad I didn't make you compare that to the beautiful SCORE engraving?)