In music scores, a house style is the collection of dozens or hundreds of rules and preferences governing the look of the music — everything from note spacing algorithms, to font choices, to the thickness of lines, and lots more.

Philip Rothman and David MacDonald discuss why these elements matter in the course of preparing a piece of music and talk about which types of text fonts pair well with music notation. We also explore the “tyranny of the default” settings in scoring software programs and get specific about how to manage house styles in Sibelius, Dorico, and Finale.

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