Digital Seductions

I am old enough to remember the profession of "music copyist." These were people employed by every composer (this was way back when composers had money) to make a fair copy of the score and parts for use in performances. The copyists had to make a clear copy of the score if the composer's own hand was not legible and then extract parts for each instrument. It was a fairly laborious process. If the work was to be published, the score and parts were then handed over to a music engraver who would engrave them on copper plates--at least as I understand it. Wikipedia has an article on music engraving. But that all went away with the advent of music software. Early versions were utilitarian and rather ugly in appearance, but things improved quickly and now music software like Finale and Sibelius automatically generate a perfect score and can extract parts in an instant. Now, mind you, after Finale has extracted the parts I have to go through them bar by bar because rhythmic proportions sometimes get distorted and things like slurs and expression marks can wander around. But the benefits are enormous as anyone can produce a publication-ready score on their desktop or laptop computer. And probably on their iPad or iPhone as well.

So for most of the last thirty years I have used music software for just about everything from theory assignments to my own compositions and have been deeply grateful for the resources. You can't imagine the benefit to a composer of a string quartet or orchestral piece of being able to hear a reasonable facsimile of what you just composed played by samples of the actual instruments. I haven't figured out how to get them to do sul ponticello, but they do pizzicato very well. Joseph Haydn had a full orchestra on call just down the hall to try things out, but the rest of us don't!

But I am writing a new piece for piano and I am going back to the oldest of old ways: scratching with a pencil on paper! An example: 

Click to enlarge

Music software, for all its benefits, is a Procrustean bed (one of my favorite metaphors) in that everything you input has to be a precise pitch, precise rhythm, precise meter and exact tempo. But that's not how musical ideas come. They are often just little fragments with no rhythm or little rhythmic ideas with no pitches. Music software has two basic uses: putting down on paper already formed ideas, playing them using samples, and printing them out as a final publication. It's role in the actual compositional "process" (I'm not sure it is a "process" actually, more like stumbling around) is minimal. So I have, gratefully, gone back to pencil and paper as the first stage. The second stage is trying out various things on the piano (even though I am not an actual pianist) and the third stage will be notating the piece. I will likely do that with the music software, but not necessarily. If I want to do something the software will not accommodate, then I will just notate it by hand.

At this stage I have mostly primitive sketches for the first movement, which I am titling "Remembering What Is to Come" which is a line from a poem I wrote some thirty years ago. The second movement is titled "Transparent Sheets of Memory" and the third is "To Ascend the Stream of Time." All about time and memory. The titles of the second and third movements are semi-quotations from The Guermantes Way by Proust. The piece as a whole will be titled Per Sonare which dates back to compositions by Giovanni Gabrieli.

I really can't put an envoi for this post!