It’s here! Black Friday, the time when retailers and consumers meet in the happy place of sales and specials. This time can be about more just getting a few dollars off, though — it can be an opportunity to acquire new skills using products and services that will benefit you all year round.

To that end, Philip Rothman and David MacDonald run through all the deals we know about for music notation software, and recap some of the latest new features that could entice you to open your wallet. We break down the ways to save while spending, including stacking discounts and taking advantage of competitive crossgrade offers, which can yield significant reductions on the overall cost of acquiring many of the products we cover on a regular basis.

We also talk about the offers for some related technology, like web apps, sound libraries, graphic design software, and more, making this episode holiday music to anyone’s ears.

On the Scoring Notes podcast, we have spoken before about music preparation and the technology we all use to create musical compositions and get them in front of players and an audience.

But how do those compositions begin in the first place?

We’re not talking about the magical moment when a composer wakes up and decides that they are going to create their magnum opus. It’s when the phone rings (or maybe these days it’s a text message or an email), and when the composer picks up, on the other end of the line there is someone inviting them — commissioning them — to write a new piece of music.

Melissa Smey is the person who has been on the other end of that line many times. She tells us all about what that process is like. Melissa is the Associate Dean and Executive Director at Columbia University School of the Arts, where she leads the Arts Initiative, Miller Theatre, and oversees the Lenfest Center for the Arts.

Melissa has commissioned over 40 new works from leading international composers and is the co-creator and host of the acclaimed podcast Mission: Commission, which demystifies the process of how classical music gets made.

We talk about the particular role a university arts presenter has in campus life and the larger community, and how Miller Theatre’s Composer Portraits have been particularly successful in building an audience that will come out to hear a wide variety of music.

We also discuss the “road trip” of commissioning a new work and the nature of music preparation in bringing a piece to life, with special attention on the performers who will ultimately be tasked with interpreting the music, whether it’s notated on paper spanning three music stands or is beamed from the latest music tablet devices.

When Aaron Copland thought of the Far West, he probably didn’t have Wisconsin in mind, but Milwaukee was the perfect location to “road test” the new edition of Rodeo.

That’s where Philip Rothman went for the first rehearsals of a new edition of Copland’s masterpiece that I prepared. The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of music director Ken-David Masur, agreed to play from a brand new set of score and parts to Rodeo.

You might wonder, what was wrong with the old edition? Certainly, it’s been played from thousands and thousands of times. When the piece was first published in the 1940s, a number of errors and inconsistencies crept into the parts. Although they’ve been corrected by intrepid orchestra librarians, it was time to get them straightened out once and for all.

One reason for the inconsistencies was that the “Four Dance Episodes” from Rodeo, which is the version that most everyone is familiar with, is extracted from the full ballet. That version left a lot to be desired in the engraving department, so, with the support of The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and in coordination with Boosey & Hawkes, the team at NYC Music Services put it all into modern software and made brand new materials for both the ballet and the Four Dance Episodes, with the goal of clarifying any discrepancies and making everything nice and easy to read.

The Milwaukee players were great, and you can read more about it on the Scoring Notes web site. It must have been fate to go there, because in researching this piece, we stumbled across a fascinating interview that Copland gave in 1970 while visiting the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. It’s thanks to the library archives of that university that we’re pleased to bring you that interview here as a Scoring Notes extra.

Copland talks with professor John Downey about the iconic ballets like Rodeo, the various people and musical trends which influenced him, and the divergent aspects of his own work throughout his career. You’ll also hear him talk about what was current at the time and discuss the future of music.

This episode is co-produced with The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, with material kindly provided from the Archives Department, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries.

More from Scoring Notes: Road report: Copland’s Rodeo in Milwaukee

We’ve spoken about opera occasionally on a few Scoring Notes episodes — like in the 2-parter we did on lyrics, for instance. But a genre as big and complex as opera deserves our uninterrupted focus. Around for centuries as an art form, opera continues its appeal through the present day, with many contemporary composers working in this area, including a few that have made it their specialty.

Due to its length, large forces and form, multiple movements, revisions, vocal elements, piano reductions, and more, if you’re working with opera, you stand to benefit from a strong knowledge of different areas of music notation software.

Joshua Luty joins Philip Rothman and David MacDonald to talk all about the intersection of the timeless art form of opera and the use of technology to help prepare it. Joshua is the music librarian for the Houston Grand Opera and serves with Philip on the MOLA Technology Committee. You won’t have to search too hard to find his expert advice on the some of the Dorico and engraving forums on the socials.

In addition to those credentials, Joshua’s the editor and rental librarian for the composer Joel Thompson, and the Former Lead Editorial Assistant for the George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition at the University of Michigan’s Gershwin Initiative, and has had other notable positions in the music field.

Joshua takes us behind the curtain and into the dungeon of the opera music library, preparing a new opera from conception to workshop to revisions and finally performance. We discuss the mix of old-fashioned and new technology that Joshua and his colleagues use to make it all happen, and learn some surprising facts about the process.

We also get essential advice about the importance of vocal scores, preparing parts, how to label inserts, cueing, and printing. Whether or not you work on opera, this podcast episode “sets the scene” with practical advice that you can “act” on when using music notation software and related technology to produce your next creation.

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Garrett Breeze’s podcast, called Selling Sheet Music, features practical advice about the art and the business of getting scores from your head to the music stand. Garrett invited Scoring Notes co-host Philip Rothman to be a guest on his show, and it was fun having someone ask Philip the questions for a change instead of the other way around.

We discussed thoughts on preparing music and the tech that’s used in everyday work. Philip talks about his business, NYC Music Services, how he got started, and how the tasks have evolved over time in response to changing needs and technological progress. We also talk about some essential elements of preparing your music for publication and how to go about choosing software that fits your workflow.

Garrett even got into the Scoring Notes spirit and titled this episode “Setting a High Bar” — that definitely ‘measures’ up to our standard of making terrible musical puns around here.

Enjoy this episode, courtesy of Garrett Breeze and Selling Sheet Music.

If you’re not up to date, then you’re missing out on the latest features. That’s always been true, but perhaps never more so than now, with regular updates being the norm for music notation software.

Philip Rothman and David MacDonald review the latest updates to Dorico, Sibelius, Finale, and MuseScore, and highlight the most useful new features — and what’s in those updates that may portend well for the future.

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Tim Davies calls himself “really an arranger that fell into orchestrating,” but that barely begins to describe the active and successful musical life that he leads. Born and educated in Australia, now based in Los Angeles, the Grammy-nominated and Annie-winning musician splits his time between orchestrating for features, television, and video games; composing his own scores; and conducting and arranging for orchestras all around the globe.

Tim’s film and TV credits as lead orchestrator and/or conductor include Frozen and Frozen 2, both Ant-Man movies, The Lego Movie 2, La La Land, Trolls, and The Peanuts Movie. He’s prolific in the world of video games, including God of War, Infamous, Sims, the Resistance and Batman franchises, Spider-man, and Halo: Infinite. He’s a busy conductor in concert halls and other live venues specializing in live to picture scores, and we haven’t even mentioned all the special projects he’s arranged for productions like the BBC Proms and Academy Awards. And if that wasn’t enough, that pair of Grammy nominations were for his own big band recordings, where he not only composed the music, but played the drums, as well.

Despite his busy schedule, Tim not only finds time to write extensively about his experience and approaches on his web site, timusic.net, but counts it as one of the most important things that he does. The series of articles about the craft of orchestration — complete with illustrated examples — numbers well into the dozens, and explores related subjects like conducting, jazz voicing, and — our favorite — music notation software.

Philip Rothman and David MacDonald have a wide-ranging conversation with Tim in which all of those topics are explored. We start with Tim’s early days as a student, where he made his own opportunities, and how his initiative and innate musicality combined with a relentless pursuit of practicality — along with a healthy dose of keyboard macros — has served him well as he worked his way to being one of the most sought-after professionals in the business.

More on Scoring Notes:

We continue our interviews with members of MOLA, An Association of Performance Librarians, at their annual conference in June. We’re calling these brief conversations “Scoring Half Notes”

In this segment, we revisit with our good friend Nicole Jordan, the principal librarian of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Nicole hosted the 2022 MOLA conference in her capacity in Philadelphia, and by sheer coincidence, she was the host of the last in-person MOLA conference in 2019 when she was principal librarian at the Atlanta Symphony.

We caught up with Nicole during the closing banquet and look back at both conferences. At the 2022 conference, Nicole delivered a presentation about recording Florence Price’s music. We learn what it was like making that composer’s voice come alive in the course of this very successful project, and  some of the similarities and differences of working with contemporary music composers.

By the way, you’ll definitely want to listen to our full interview with Nicole from an earlier episode, if you haven’t heard it already, where Nicole quizzes us about our software recommendations and gets our advice for people who are just beginning their technological journey.

More from Scoring Notes:

We continue to share some interviews that we did with members of MOLA, An Association of Performance Librarians, at their annual conference in June. We’re calling these brief conversations “Scoring Half Notes”.

In this segment, we talk with Mark Fabulich, an assistant librarian at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Mark is the chair of MOLA’s Technology Committee. In that role, he guides its members as they stay on top of the latest digital developments and disseminate that information to the general MOLA membership.

At the MOLA conference, Mark co-delivered a presentation entitled “(Y)Our Future with Digital Sheet Music” with Georgina Govier, head of music library at the Welsh National Opera, as well as with none other than Scoring Notes podcast co-host David MacDonald. We talk about the content of that presentation, as well as other technologies like Photoshop, spreadsheets, and, of course, music notation software — all of which today’s performance librarian needs to have at their disposal in their modern digital toolbox.

More from Scoring Notes:

For the next few weeks we’ll be sharing some interviews that we did with members of MOLA, An Association of Performance Librarians, at their annual conference in June. We’re calling these brief conversations “Scoring Half Notes”.

In today’s segment, we talk with Jane Cross, a music archivist at the Library of Congress. She’s been in that position nearly three years, and before that, was a librarian with the prestigious United States Marine Band for 22 years; 11 of those as chief librarian.

At the MOLA conference, Jane delivered a presentation entitled “Bits and Bytes: Managing All Those Digital Music Files”. It’s a topic we turn to from time to time here on Scoring Notes, and we loved catching up with an actual archivist to tell us how to be our best selves in this area. Even if you weren’t present for Jane’s discussion, we’ve included a link to her presentation and a very helpful risk mitigation worksheet. You’ll want to remember the acronym LOCKSS: “Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”.

Bits and Bytes: Managing All Those Digital Music Files:

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