I get the impression that, for most purposes, the two are much of a much-ness these days anyway. It certainly wasn't always that way, though. There was a time where, while able to produce something quite beautiful (or at least acceptable) straight out of the box, Sibelius wasn't particularly customisable in terms of the sorts of 'extended' notational devices used by yourself or Stranger Cassidy. Finale, at that time, required an enormous amount of tinkering under the hood simply in order to produce something that didn't look like total balls, but the fact that it allowed you to go in and compensate for its ugliness to such a huge extent also allowed the opportunity to make it do strange things... unspeakable things....

So I guess that, while the two are essentially interchangeable now, they've arrived at a middle-ground from opposite ideological directions: Finale was a very powerful engraving package that has, over the years, been gradually bogged down by more and more features aimed at MIDI-phile secondary teachers, while Sibelius was an attractive, solid notation programme that has been built up to include most (if not all) features that could have swayed a user in the past towards Finale. This manifests in little ways, such as Sibelius' thinking it knows better than you.

I myself am an ex-Finale user. I still use it for things like orchestral works, but its really all pencil-and-paper for me.

Against my better judgement I'm inputting my latest score into Sibelius.
How did this happen. I thought it would look lovely copied out by hand but here I am.

"Back in '60s, composing my music was a long and arduous task, but with Sibelius 5®, a forty-minute piece is just a mouse-click away!"

I remember in one of my first ever composition lessons, my then teacher showing me excitedly how you could 'extend and vary' material by - get this - using copy/paste, and then the transposition tool.



In the unlikely event that he's reading this: I'm not passing any kind of judgment on what you do - honest! - I just don't think 'copy and paste' as a compositional technique is commonly conducive to the creation of good music in the hands of a musical Wunderkind, let alone a rank amateur like me...

I've seen music which had clearly been composed with heavy reliance on that "principle". Of course the big problem doesn't lie so much in doing the copy/paste thing in itself, but in conceiving of notation as one's "material".

Quite right, but this assumes an engagement with a particular line of ontological thought that isn't so much engaged with as ignored by many of contemporaries.

Still being very much in the process of getting acquainted with who I actually am as a composer (I feel like I've only really 'come into focus' as a musical personality over the last 15 months or so, although this 'coming into focus' has allowed me to better appreciate earlier works that I perpetrated), I'm constantly surprised that the issue of notation is a constant problem. The parameters of my work are so frequently in the realms of the geometrical (although not mathematical), the architectural (although not the physical) and the proportional that the path towards notation is rarely an obvious one, these days.

That said, I am frequently finding myself using the parametric composition process as a basis from which to 'compose' a notation. Thus a notation provides a delineation of limit (a kind of containment field) for the 'liveness' of performance. Sort of a way of trapping force.

Sorry for my inability to articulate this properly. It's one of the reasonably few things which make perfect sense to me in a non-verbalised way, but becomes utterly mauled by transfiguring syntax. Which is interesting, 'cos it's kind of analogous to the what I'm trying to say about notation and performative force.

It was all much easier when notation was material.

Dude, you gotta see someone. 

Seriously, though, and not wishing to take this thread into realms better served by the 'higher education' thread, I find it well-nigh impossible to get most composition students to even start appreciating that there may be some fruitful things to be had by thinking of notation as more than merely a pretty crude tool with which to jot down what comes to them without a lot of creative effort; that it might, for instance, be a way of engaging performers in some kind of creative interaction, or setting them conceptual hurdles which challenge them to bring a lot more to performance than is there on paper in any nuts-and-bolts terms.