I'm sure you will, aaron. I think I'm struggling with the idea of academia myself at the moment - someone I spoke to the other day seemed to think it was an obvious place for me to be, which is the first time for 2 or 3 years that anyone'd actually said that.

I hadn't realised till today that you produced EXAUDI's NMC discs. Does that mean you come to England sometimes?

I bought Sib 4 recently enough to qualify for a free upgrade to Sib 5, which arrived today. I'm still in the lower reaches of the learning curve but still: Panorama may be a 'non-innovation' for some of us but for me it's much for comfortable than before. (I always hated the way tweaking a note position could make the whole page lurch out from under you...) Panorama is roughly equivalent to how it would be if decades after the invention of the word processor someone had finally come up with what Word calls 'Normal View'.

On the other hand the new start-up music is dreadful. Why Sibelius 3 when the obvious symphony to have used is full of great start-up anthems? And even then why did they pick that bit? And why the Naxos performance?


How, hh? I'd be very keen to know.

Ah. So it's the old hold-a-ruler-up-to-the-screen trick... 

Thanks for passing that on. But there must be a better way! Aaron tells me it's possible on Finale but even then you have to do the calculations yourself.

This is silly. The darned computer has all the information inside it anyway. So many composers (and occasional notators such as I) want the programs to be able to do this. And yet they don't.

Let's do something about it.

Let's whinge.

http://www.finalemusic.com/contacts.aspx
http://www.sibelius.com/documents/contact.html

Who knows, maybe one of them might listen... 

Oh; fantastic.  Do let us know what they reply.

This is incorrect. No true composer needs "time-space notation." Indeed one of the first tests of a composer is the ability to notate his music in the traditional and normal way. To say that this is not software for "composers," that is, is an unacceptable and wanton redefinition of the word "composer."

Sibelius so far the first to reply. With this helpful little message.


But Ha! If they think they can fob me off by sending me a message in Foreign they have another think coming!

(To be fair, yes I do live in Germany. On the other hand I ordered Sibelius in English and my preferred language is registered with the Sib people as English so sending me a letter in German in response to a question asked in English at the international website is to my mind a bit of a Zumutung.)


This is of course true. One of the first tasks of a composer after they have passed their 'first tests', however, is to ascertain if there might exist some other way which better corresponds to the manner in which they wish to convey information to the performer. Many who have done so have settled upon this proportional method, which would seem to be something a computer program could trivially easily support, and it's something that I as a performer very much welcome in music beyond a certain degree of rhythmic complexity. It is thus to my mind absurd that the currently available programs do not support it.

Member Cassidy's meaning was of course that the interests of composers are subsidiary to those of the other groups of musicians he mentioned. But I trust that that was clear to most.


Come on, Aaron. We can aim higher than that!

Here is a vote of support for the Plötzliche Feldzug to have time-space notation available on Sibelius and Finale. It makes life much easier for the performer, especially when this is combined with notation of the tuplets (as in the case of Dench and Barrett).