We prepare all of the orchestral music for Carnegie Hall’s Link Up educational program, for students in grades 3 through 5. It’s deeply satisfying taking a masterwork by a great composer like Stravinsky and revisiting it by setting the notes anew. It wasn’t just the grade school students who were educated during this process!
In this installment of DJA’s Notes by Darcy James Argue, we learn the dos and donts of one- and two-bar repeats, numbering repeated bars, and how to lay out the music correctly so that the intent is clearly conveyed.
In anticipation of the 2018 Major Orchestra Librarians’ Association (MOLA) conference, an interview with librarian Paul Beck about his life and work, and to hear in his own words what it means to perform the essential function of the librarian in today’s musical world.
Originally appearing as a document that composer David MacDonald created for his weekly master class, this bullet-list of score preparation and production notes will improve the quality of your performance materials in no time. To it we have added relevant links from Scoring Notes and other sources.
In this installment of DJA’s Notes by Darcy James Argue, learn how to left-align chord symbols in all three major commercial music notation software programs, in order to avoid confusion on the stand.
DJA’s Notes is a new series inspired by Darcy James Argue’s Facebook posts, which offer some quick, basic steps to improve the appearance of notated music, especially from a jazz/big band perspective. In this post, learn how to group instruments correctly and change what the notation software may do by default.
I often receive inquiries wondering if 9” x 12” paper was acceptable for orchestral use, or if 10” x 13” is necessary. Here are my thoughts based on experience preparing music for hundreds of orchestral projects.
Ever since Sibelius 4 introduced Dynamic Parts feature in 2005, and Finale 2007 followed in due course with Linked Parts a year later, I’ve hardly ever needed to extract parts from a Finale or Sibelius file — and you shouldn’t have to, either.
David Newman’s score to the 1996 Danny DeVito movie Matilda, with its energy, whimsy, and sweetness, is a favorite among film score enthusiasts. Learn what it took to prepare the music for a recent premiere with live orchestra.
Following up on our last post about getting a studio look to your bar numbers in Sibelius, we’ll now show you how to achieve it in Finale by placing them on their own separate one-line staff.