The Engraving Process
For those who love seeing processes, especially non-musicians, I thought I’d share part of the process of bringing a composition to the players/singers. As you know, there is the incubation/creative part. But once the music is on the page, you can’t slam your computer shut and go celebrate. (Well, maybe a little!) The next step is called Engraving, which essentially means copyediting. (Yes, I’m oversimplifying.)
Today, I’m going to share about critical page turns, where a musician has to stop playing to turn a page. Engravers have to move elements around the parts individually (format), and find a good place with sufficient time for a page turn (multiple rests.) Easy peasey, right?
Not so fast.
It can be complicated. For example, some players need longer time for this–harpist vs singer. Where are you going to find enough bars of rest? I mean, suppose a player has no sufficient rest time for a turn until partway down the next page.
What then?
It’s complicated, but one option is to squeeze all that music onto one page until you do find a break. But what if that is too many notes? That could mean some notes get squeezed too tightly together and make reading them difficult.
What now?
Well, I love this part of engraving. It’s like solving a Sudoku or a mystery, but you need the right tool. Most notation software doesn’t this automatically, to a point, but I finally found a software that gives me intricate control over each tiny note placement for extreme problems like this. So happy! (Thank you, Dorico.)
Show me an example?
The three pics on this post will help you see how this works. Non-musicians, think of this as a bunch of dots to be evenly spaced. In the pics, I had to address the rare occasion when you have to squeeze far too many bars onto a page so that after the page turn, there was a long rest.
The first pic (above) shows notes (circled) that became too squishy, like being in a NYC subway. But the tiny boxes allowed me to move each note a teeny tiny bit to remedy this.
The second picture (above) shows the first adjustment on that particular area (red boxes are tweaks).
Love for the performer
The third pic (above) shows the solution. Voila! So fun and it looks so nice.
Remember, that was one beat in one bar on one part. Fortunately, with this software, this isn’t necessary very often, but imagine 7-15 pages of page turns per part and 7 parts to engrave, or for an orchestral pieces of 29 parts or more, this being only one element of many in the engraving process to bring performers a great part.
Welcome to our world! That, my dear friends, is why you don’t see us schmoozing on Facebook very often during this part of the process! Send flowers!
Hope you are enjoying your work as much as I am. Have a great day!