Yes, Virginia, Neatness Counts

Regular readers may remember when, several weeks ago, I wrote about my first adjudicatory experience as a composer; I’d listened to a whole slew of submissions for the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts here in Minneapolis (February 26 – March 2, 2008). I also had the opportunity to view a number of scores, and when I cast my beady eye across a few such manuscripts still languishing in the U of MN composition TAs’ barracks yesterday, I was reminded of a pet peeve of mine, a peeve whose dilated udders swell with contentious, unpasteurized NewMusicBox milk. Here it comes.

It’s time to learn Finale.

I mean, like, really learn it. You don’t have to make your own font or tweak the line widths and spacings like some kind of OCD information-age Petrucci, although you should maybe look beyond Maestro and (shudder) Times New Roman. Just make sure your dynamics aren’t all up on your staves. If a notehead is occluding the next note’s accidental, move it on over. That kind of thing. And I haven’t forgotten you Sibelians either. Just because you have warm-looking defaults and an intuitive interface doesn’t mean you can afford to cut corners here either.

This kind of nitpicking is petty, I know, but as someone who sometimes spends six hours a day in front of Finale, I’m acutely conscious of the decisions (or non-decisions) that went into preparing a score at the computer. It’s worth taking just a little more time to make sure these bothersome details don’t de- or distract from the substance of your music. Presentation may not “count,” but I find it difficult to overlook.

[Disclaimer: Although this bitter salvo happened to have been prompted by a Spark submission, the Spark scores, on the whole, actually looked much better than many self-published scores I’ve seen. This is not a problem endemic to electronic arts festivals in the Upper Midwest, you may rest assured.]