Behind Bars readthrough: Introduction

Elaine Gould's Behind Bars is a fantastic new reference work on all aspects of music notation. Over the next 6 months, I will be covering a chapter per week, summarizing the content and commenting on various issues that arise in the text. I will welcome thoughts and comments from the community as I progress through the material.

To begin with, the introduction covers three areas: the need for scores and parts prepared with an understanding of basic notational standards, the historical context of this book and a guide for using the book. Her argument for the need for expertise in the principles of music notation is as follows:

Summary: The need for notational standards
If computer software, given a competent user, can produce sharp-looking music, why learn about music notation? The computer can only go so far. It will apply notation principles, but without the knowledge to determine appropriateness to a situation, the result will just as likely hinder the performance as not. "Through a mutual understanding of the rules and conventions of notation, the composer can 'speak' effectively to the performer, who then has the best chance of achieving a faithful interpretation of the composer's intentions"

Commentary:
As an engraver, my goal is to facilitate the communication between composer and performer to the greatest degree possible. My lifeblood consists of these rules and conventions and their proper application. Frequently I find that composers are often extremely good at writing music but don't have a thorough grounding in the layout and disposition of a score and parts. The effect is usually to make performers work too hard to play the music.

Gould notes that in her experience, "professionals are frequently too tolerant of poor presentation." As a performer myself, I know that I almost never have any say in the quality of the part. Indeed, a particularly bad part will be the subject of jokes and bellyaching in the back row, but it will rarely get to the conductor's ears, let alone the composer's. The performer's job is to read whatever chicken scratch or too-small music is put in front of her and play it beautifully. If there are poor page turns, make a copy. If it's too scrunched, squint. When the player is working this hard just to get the music off the page, excellent performance becomes more of a luxury than a given. How much rehearsal time is wasted for someone to ask if a passage should be slurred or tongued like his neighbor? How many questions never get asked and the assumptions and errors made impact the performance negatively? How much new music is never played again because the parts were terrible?

Summary: Historical Context
The next part in the introduction concerns the historical context of this book. Her central point is that established notational conventions provide the most help to the musician because they can be read and understood quickly. In the mid-twentieth century, a wide variety of new notation was created to solve particular compositional challenges. Gould establishes her lineage here: Karkoschka's 1972 Notation in New Music and Stone's 1980 Music Notation in the Twentieth Century. Karkoschka sought to outline the multiplicity of new notational approaches and Stone sought to establish conventions that addressed the needs of contemporary composers. The intent of Behind Bars is to examine the developments of the past thirty years and propose recommendations based on current practice.

Commentary:
I have loved Kurt Stone's book for years. It was a light to me in a world full of arbitrary conventions. Here it was: these are the best ways that we could agree on to notate music. Based on the findings of the 1974 Ghent conference, more than 400 disparate notational methods were evaluated and the clearest chosen. Too often, notation manuals were based on the direct experience of one individual who undertook to poll a handful of colleagues for their input. Ted Ross' 1970 Teach Yourself the Art of Music Engraving and Processing is a wonderful resource for spacing and basic notation, but it's very idiomatic and limited in scope. Gardner Read's seminal Music Notation: a Manual of Modern Practice from 1969 is a monumental effort, but suffers from being from the perspective of a composer and scholar. The ideas put forward are intensely personal and yet presented as being absolute fact. He's done the research, but has come to his own unilateral positions. It also tends to be overwritten and pompous.

One of the reasons that I'm excited about Behind Bars is that it comes from the point of view of a music editor. Her primary goal is to create editions that make money. Assuming that the choice of music is out of her hands, she must produce the finest presentation of that music possible. High-quality engraving says to the purchaser that the utmost care was given to the production of the edition and they will be assured of a smooth and enjoyable performance of the music. To that end, she is concerned with what is best for players and how to make the work as consistent and dependable as possible. Her thirty years of experience in the field and the production of uncounted thousands of diverse scores give her the authority to make solid recommendations. Of course, the viewpoint of one person lends itself to idiosyncratic pronouncements. She acknowledges a wide variety of experts in various fields that have helped her form opinions. The result is a carefully-considered, well-presented reference work that has clear, thoughtful recommendations for an extraordinary range of situations.

Summary: Using Behind Bars
The book has a clear hierarchy of headings with related subjects grouped and cross-referenced. Topics are structured "definition -- design -- placing -- use" and progress from elementary to complex. Technical terms  in other languages are presented if in common use. Items are illustrated with good and bad practices.

"Effective communication results from establishing a convention and adopting a consistent approach." Any new recommendations are simple, clear and based in traditional practice when possible.

Commentary:
I'm looking forward to going through this book with you and exploring the current state of music notation and how it differs from and complements my own current understanding. Adventures in Music Engraving indeed!

Dramatically enhancing Sibelius' keypad

A couple of years ago, I was reading about interface design and came across Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface. His ideas about quasimodes intrigued me to a great extent and I thought Sibelius' keypad would be a great place to apply the technique. The short version is: whereas the caps lock puts the keyboard into a capitalized mode, the shift key puts the keyboard into a capitalized quasimode. You have to hold down the shift key for as long as you want caps, so you are always aware of what mode you're in.

With the keypad, I can switch to different layouts to do different things with the same key (in the F8 (basic) layout, the 1 key gives me a 32nd note; in the F11 layout, the same key gives me a fermata). The problem came in when I forgot what mode I was in. Sometimes, I would want a 32nd note, but mistakenly apply a fermata instead. To avoid this, I reset the keypad every time I use it (F8 or shift + numpad+). Therefore, when I wanted a fermata, I would reset the layout, then press numpad+ 3 times (or press F11), press 1, then reset the layout again: not very efficient.

I wrote a script for AutoHotkey that automatically returned to the basic layout after I used the desired function. For a fermata, I would press and hold F11, press 1, and then release F11. That way, I always knew what I was entering.

After using this system for a couple of years on a Windows machine, I switched to a Mac and found my beloved AutoHotkey would not follow me to the new computer. The degree to which I had grown dependent upon this new behavior in Sibelius was striking. I had forgotten just how annoying it was to reset the keypad before and after every use. It seemed like every error I made was due to the keypad being on the wrong setting.

Today, though, I found ControllerMate. With it, I was able to quickly duplicate the desired behavior in the OSX environment. It has been refreshing never to have to worry about the keypad again! I hope that the Sibelius developers include it in a future build, but I'm happy that I can both have and eat cake on any system I choose.

To be clear: this change to Sibelius' keypad is among the best gifts you can give yourself, right up there with an 88-key keyboard and enormous monitors. It is entirely worth the effort and is highly recommended.


Supplemental Material:

Terrific article about quasimodes

AutoHotkey

ControllerMate

You can download my setup file for ControllerMate here. It is based on the Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (USB) and requires Sibelius' keypad layouts to have the following keyboard shortcuts: Basic: F14; More Notes: F15; Beams/Tremolos: ctrl+opt+cmd+w; Articulations: ctrl+opt+cmd+v; Jazz Articulations: ctrl+opt+cmd+z


The AutoHotkey script I wrote follows: copy it, put it into a text file and rename it *.ahk. Then execute it with AutoHotkey.

--

;Quasimode hack for Sibelius keypad states

~F9::
KeyWait, F9
send {F8}
return

~F10::
KeyWait, F10
send {F8}
return

~F11::
KeyWait, F11
send {F8}
return

~F12::
KeyWait, F12
send {F8}
return

--

Optical note spacing

I recently obtained a book by Herbert Chlapik entitled Die Praxis des Notengraphikers, or (roughly – my German is tenuous at best!) The Practice of the Music Engraver. With a little help from Google Translate, I'd like to present his description of optical note spacing. Neither Sibelius' nor Finale's spacing algorithms take this into account, so every instance must be corrected by hand.

Optical Compensation

Every typesetter or graphic designer understands that the different letters, especially capitals, require their typographical design be taken into account. It is an optical phenomenon that

uniform spacing between letters in certain combinations creates precisely the opposite impression. Only kerning – introducing a a small expansion or contraction between letter pairs – creates an optical illusion that suggests complete uniformity.

Though unkerned pairs in may be perceived as ugly, the readability is not affected much. This may in fact be the case with music notation as well. The widely disparate forms of musical symbols and their position to each other tends to cause irregularities which are disproportionately larger than those found in a line of text. The spacing between the characters is defined by the rhythmic structure and must assist the musicians' spontaneous comprehension. Notes must therefore be spaced not just according to their calculated position, but also so as to be visually correct.

An optical compensation must be made in the following situations:

1. When stem-up and stem-down notes are next to one another.

2. If there is a (lower) stem-up note after a rest.

3. Cross-staff beaming [this is a subset of the first case]

As examples 1–3 show, one does not calculate the distance between the notes, but between the stems. This seemingly-erroneous calculation of the note spacing causes the optical illusion that looks correct to the eye.

4. Large intervals.

Reduce the space between large intervals by about a third.

5. For the space between stem-up short-value notes and the barline.

The space between the last note and the barline should be slightly larger than the exact calculation.

Only in multisystem situations is the optical compensation improper because it can cause distortions in the other voices.

[Here he discusses vertical spacing between staves. In short, the uppermost and lowermost characters on adjacent staves define the closest possible distance between them. Any extra space left over after all the staves are spaced may be equally distributed.]

Since it is impossible to show all variants of the optical compensation, examples must be limited to the essentials. The trained eye can find other situations where a slight compensation would give a better visual result.

The translation (such as it is) is mine, but the text and images are copyrighted 1987 by Ludwig Doblinger (Bernhard Herzmansky) KG, Wien – München. Published here under the fair use provision of section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

Toward Engraved Braces

Treat braces as first-class citizens

As I was working on duplicating braces from the 1960s, I realized an important limitation of both Finale and Sibelius. Both programs use a single stretched shape to handle all possible staff widths. The implications are clear: for staves that have narrower or wider spaces than the symbol was designed for, it becomes distorted and ugly. My solution? Replace the single shape with several shapes specifically designed for a range of distances. The program should dynamically swap them out as staff distances change.

Computer fonts have a similar problem. If a font is designed to look good at 12pt, it will look too thin at 6pt and too fat at 72pt. Type companies, realizing this, release versions of high-end typefaces that are appropriately-weighted. Six-point caption-weight fonts have thicker lines and are slightly wider. Seventy-two-point heading fonts have a greater difference between thick and thin lines and have more delicately-pointed serifs. Adobe has an illuminating article on this practice here. The computer won't do it for you, though. It's up to the layout designer to know about the issue and select an appropriate typeface for the job at hand. For music engravers, the choice is not quite so easy.

How did they do it before?

For much of the history of music engraving, braces were set using differently-sized punches. Each punch size would be individually crafted to have correct proportions. With the advent of photographic reproduction and dry-transfer sheets, manufacturers began to cheat. Instead of having individually-designed braces, different sizes would be taken from one master symbol and optically reduced or enlarged. Very small and very large braces continued to have their own symbols. By the time computer software started to be written, I surmise that memory limitations and programming expediency led to the one-symbol solution. Since it is generally innocuous, it has persisted to the present day.

Let's do it right.

"Generally innocuous" does not excellent engraving make. You can see in the image below what happens at large and small distances. Sibelius scales a little better than Finale, but the braces are still distorted. If one were to apply this kind of stretching to a familiar character, one can immediately see the violence done to the letterform. As the level of stretching increases, the line weights become increasingly out of proportion. With the Boosey braces, two strategies are employed. The brace at the left is the model; the middle brace is an optically-reduced version of it. The smallest brace is a unique symbol. This is the strategy I recommend to the MakeMusic and Avid.

There should be four or five unique braces, each tailored to look good for a particular range of staff distances. Each brace should be uniformly scaled to match the specific staff distance. As distances change, different symbols should be swapped in. The number of unique symbols should be enough that its extremes are not noticeable (a brace designed for a 1-space gap would look funny enlarged to fit 4 staves). This would produce the highest possible quality for these delicate and graceful symbols.

Stravinsky redone

I've remade the Stravinsky pages so that they are a close match to the 1967 Boosey & Hawkes re-engraving of the 1947 revision. My original pages were based on the Dover reprint of a 1965 Moscow edition that had many errors. Take a look and let me know what you think!

It was an interesting exercise to copy the old engraving. The biggest lesson I came away with was that the old guys really, truly, thoroughly knew their stuff. Every single one of the pages in that edition is a beautifully-set prime example of the engraver's art. Here is a scan of the two pages that I copied.

One of the trickier parts was emulating the type style. They used a version of Century that I could not duplicate very well. The closest I could come was Century Old Style. The problem arose when trying to set type like instrument names or performance directions. They had access to a type weight roughly equivalent to caption -- about halfway between regular and bold. This is a type weight intended to be set at about 6pt and be readable. I chose to use a bold weight for the instrument names and the regular weight for performance direcitons. Even though the thin parts of the font are a bit light at this size, it still created a reasonable look.

Another tricky thing to duplicate was the braces. I posted earlier about trying to recreate these braces in Finale, failing, and having to use Illustrator only to find that Finale's graphics importing doesn't work so well. Even though it turned out that I could duplicate one size of the braces in Finale, stretching that shape to encompass different vertical staff widths distorted it considerably. One of the little signposts of the older engraved style is braces that don't quite match the top and bottom of the enclosed staves They would have several sizes of braces available and match as closely as possible. To preserve that look, I surveyed the pages and found that there were three distinct braces. The larger two were simply scaled versions of each other, but the smaller one was a unique shape. After creating the three types of braces in Illustrator, I brought my pages into InDesign so that I could position them correctly.

Since exporting a PDF from InDesign rasterized the pages and decreased the quality somewhat, I resorted to a fairly circuitous workaround. After removing the pages from the InDesign file, I exported a PDF with just the properly-positioned braces. I then overlaid that file on top of the original PDF exported from Finale. This method preserved the desired vector graphics while achieving authentically-sized and -positioned braces. It's a very small touch, but I think it adds a lot to the feel of the pages.

Post below if you have any comments or questions and I'll do my best to address them.

(Re)Learning Finale, Part 6 – Wrapping it up

(You might wish to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5 first.)

*note - this is a fairly long post in which I talk about Finale's interface and underlying mechanics, some things the program does well, and the miserable situation brought on by marketing needs. Have fun!

What have I learned about Finale?

I've been reacquainting myself with MakeMusic's Finale 2008 over the last couple of weeks and have come to a new appreciation of the software. I have a much greater familiarity with the kind of thinking that created it and the market pressures that have made it what it is today. I am also much more comfortable entering and editing music within the confines of the system. At this point, I would rate myself conversant, but not yet to my level of expertise and efficiency in Sibelius. I've had to achieve many graphic effects the hard way. The plus side is that I now have a much deeper understanding about how the underlying programming works and can use that to my advantage in the future.

Tools and Modes

At its core, Finale is a program from the late 1980s that has persevered mightily. Over time, it has accreted new features and refined some of its more glaring flaws, but its basic way of doing things hasn't changed much in 20 years. Every aspect of the program is compartmentalized, which lends itself very well to a particular style of workflow. If you want to 1) enter notes, 2) add dynamics and directions, 3) add slurs and lines 4) layout the page and tweak positions, Finale works fine. The advantage to this kind of tool-based design is that working on articulations doesn't affect slurs and lines; adjusting spacing for one measure doesn't necessarily affect the spacing of any other measure. It serves as a mental focus – to make the user contemplate only one aspect of the music at a time.

The downside is inherent to the design. Because the user can only deal with one aspect at a time, switching between many tools to accomplish a given task is often required. The recently-introduced Selection Tool simplifies the process; I can drag most items, and a context menu allows basic edits to be made. Double-clicking any given item generally switches to the appropriate tool. However, creating any item requires the user to be in a particular mode.

Aza Raskin at Humanized wrote a very useful discussion about the dangers of modes here. The basic gist is that having to stop and recognize what mode the system is in before taking an action interrupts the train of thought. Resuming the task after determining the mode adds a cognitive burden, even to experienced users. Incorrectly determining the mode of the program causes a mode error – if I think the program is set up to input articulations when it is actually in Expression mode, holding down H and clicking a note will produce a sf under the note, instead of my desired harmonic diamond above the note. To avoid such an error, I will tend to clear the current tool by pressing ESC, and then select the desired mode of entry. These interruptions of the train of thought make editing music in Finale much more about the system used than the flow of the work. (Happily, Finale does have some quasimodal inputs – using the right click + drag to move the score around is a prime example)

With that said, it is certainly possible for experienced users to produce quality work quickly. Getting in the flow of the program and knowing how things work goes a long way toward increasing efficiency. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the arcana of music engraving. No computer program can be a perfect engraver – a well-trained and judicious eye is necessary for high-level output.

Experience and Automation

In years past, engraving a page of music required the precise hand-positioning of every single mark on every single page. From page numbers to slur curvature, there was no such thing as feasible automation. Typeset music could never match the nuance and subtlety of a page engraved in tin or composed from acetate rub-offs. When computers came into use for engraving in the 60s and 70s, hand-positioning of every symbol was still required. As software became more sophisticated, an increasing percentage of the page could be automated. Today, many standard engraving rules are followed without the user's input. Many modern users don't even know what "casting off" means, because fitting measures of music on a staff is not only automated, but so easily modified. Getting it right the first time is simply no longer necessary.

Finale poses a particular challenge. On one hand, I should be able expect the program to follow the most basic engraving rules. Stem lengths and directions, beam angles, instrument name positioning, etc. On the other hand, I am responsible for every mark on every page that leaves my workstation. Generally average to poor automatic placement on Finale's part means that I can take nothing for granted. Every line has to be carefully nudged into place and reexamined periodically to ensure that it hasn't been repositioned without my input. Every beam and every articulation has to be adjusted slightly. What ends up happening is that the very automation that we prize from the software as time-saving in fact requires us to spend more time making sure that it doesn't screw things up. Sometimes it feels as though Score users have it right – very little automatic anything. Sure, it may take a little longer, but it's right the first time without any second-guessing.

So, do you like anything about Finale?

Compared with Sibelius, the typography, slurs and instrument/group bracketing are significantly superior. Handling of text expressions is a wholly different approach that involves a tradeoff. Finale includes a limited drawing module and Sibelius does not. There is a general sense of being able to adjust many more settings with finer granularity, though I'm not sure how far that goes.

The basic typography in Finale won't win any awards, but it does include some crucial adjustments that Sibelius sorely lacks. Kerning is the most important of these. Being able to adjust the individual spacing between letters allows the engraver to correct prominent text so that it flows better. Individual-character baseline-shifting and super/subscript are other welcome settings.

Text expressions are an odd beast in Finale, but offer some unique advantages over Sibelius. When one enters an expression, one must choose between selecting an existing expression and creating a new one. This system creates a master list of all expressions in the score. Every time one places an f, one just invokes another instance of the master f. So if you want to change something about every given expression in the score, one simply goes to the list, makes the change once and it is propagated throughout the score instantly. To make a change for just one instance, one must create an entirely new expression. This method allows a very fine global control over the positioning and text content of all of the expressions in the score. (This also belies the program's beginnings in the late '80s – this approach saves a lot of memory in big scores.)

Sibelius, on the other hand, uses a system of text styles. Each text object is a separate container that inherits a particular style's properties. If the style changes, so does the format of the text. Individual expressions must be altered individually. Text styles can help ensure a consistent look throughout the piece. Both programs' systems involve tradeoffs. Finale requires micromanagement to make sure that every expression conforms to a consistent style (did I make stacc. and marc. both 12pt Times italic?). Sibelius requires micromanagement to make sure that each expression is properly positioned and consistent with others of its type (did I have "a2" or "a 2" earlier?). In the end, this one comes down to personal preference.

Finale's drawing module, the Shape Designer, is unique to the program. It allows custom vector graphics to be precisely created and placed in the score. Even though the module is redolent of early-90s MS Paint, it is possible to create some quite complex images. It's possible to create some rudimentary shapes with Sibelius, but for any degree of difficulty, it's far preferable to use a third-party program like Illustrator.

I've talked in some detail about Finale's instrument grouping and slurs before, so I won't retread here.

Marketing Pressures

MakeMusic has been in a bind for quite a while. They are saddled with a program with an archaic interface and an entrenched group of expert users who rely on it for their livelihood. They are in business to make money. Music notation has ever been a niche market in a niche market. Music engravers are an even smaller share of that already miniscule market. Their strategy has been twofold – market Finale and its associated products to educators, composers and recording artsts and release upgrades every year. This strategy reliably results in gimmicky features tacked on to the program for every release. Instead of fixing core issues with the program, they spend their development time and money on being able to input notes via guitar or microphone and automatically add dynamics. Now I can add an audio track to a score and mix the volume and panning of individual staves. I understand why they think they have to jazz up each new version with something, anything, to get more new people to buy the software. Finale's yearly upgrades at $119.95 (or $169.95 for those who are bad and skip years) have been described as more akin to leasing the program rather than owning it.

It is not just MakeMusic's desire to attract new users that inhibits any true innovation. Finale's expert users have become accustomed to the many quirks of the program. Dramatically changing the interface would alienate them. Instead of going through and stripping out old, obsolete code and building a fresh program, they are forced to keep supporting the last 20 years of users and files. To correct the most egregious faults, they have taken to including certain plug-in packages rather than going through and actually fixing them.

Here's an image for you: Finale is a man riding a rickety unicycle holding a large basket of watermelons. He has been doing this all day every day for many years. His clothes are threadbare and the unicycle is in need of a new inner tube and probably new spokes wouldn't hurt. The watermelons at the bottom of the basket are rotting a bit. Periodically, his manager comes along and tosses a few more watermelons on top of the heap.

What you're supposed to do is lose the watermelons and get the guy a shower, a shave, a new suit and a bicycle. Or maybe a Maserati. What you're not supposed to do is decide that maybe cantaloupe would look more enticing on top of the basket.

So what's the verdict?

Finale is an immensely powerful program that can accomplish virtually any given musical situation. However, the interface and underlying workings of the program are clumsily-updated holdovers from the 1980s. Barring a substantial shift in marketing strategy from MakeMusic, it is likely that future updates will follow their well-established pattern. As Sibelius improves its fine-tuning capabilities and steadily encroaches upon Finale's market share, more and more music publishers will start preferring it. Right now, though, it is the dominant software and I am well-served by fluency in it. I can only hope that MakeMusic takes a good, hard, look at what they have and make their next release a leaner, faster, better system rather than more watermelons on the basket.

The braces issue - fixed!

I posted my dilemma regarding braces on the MakeMusic forums. A kindly soul took a look at my brace and managed to make it himself just using the editor in Finale's Document Options. Somehow in my previous efforts I missed the setting marked "Center Thickness," which was the catalyst for all of my adventures in Illustrator and Photoshop.

While I am now able to achieve my desired braces in Finale, this does not excuse the truly miserable time I had trying to import graphics. Maybe it's just me and the combination of software and hardware I have on my system. Maybe I did or did not check a particular setting when creating my images.

Oh well. At least it works now.