sound expanse

Last month before attending the Donaueschinger Musiktage, I stayed with a wonderful family in Munich. Cordula Roleff runs a business as a distributor of music books and scores (Musikliteratur- und Notenversand).

We decided to collaborate on a pre-holiday experiment to help you save on trans-Atlantic postage for scores. If you're in the US and want scores from Europe, let me know by November 20th. I'll put the order in with Cordula, bring the package back with me from London in early December, and send out the scores when I get home. If you're in Europe, you can contact Cordula directly. Her site is in German, but she is also fluent in English.

The prices of scores usually go up with each calendar year, so it might be a good time to place an order in any case.

I've had and will continue to have struggles with notation. I finally realized that I love delving into these problems. I'll talk about conceptual and performance issues later, but this set of posts will deal with software.

I started writing music by hand. I might have continued, but my handwriting is terrible and I make lots of mistakes. Then I learned Finale. It has its bugs, but it worked well for me for a number of years, and I still use it for some pieces. I especially appreciate its basic willingness to be fooled. The software almost has a built-in wink. "Well here is how it's supposed to be done, but if you really want to try that ... oh go ahead then." I spent a year with Sibelius and found no such flexibility. I'm sure I could have found some workarounds if I were more clever, but I felt a bit like e.e. cummings facing Microsoft Word's AutoCorrect function: there were lots of unnecessary battles to fight.

So for a time, I was back on Finale. Then I began to embrace my own tendencies and realized that as a composer, I'm not always interested in the major on-staff elements: notes and rhythms. The question became, what parameters are in play in each piece, and what notation will convey those most clearly? I wrote a set called enclosed for various instruments. In addition to a couple of pieces in Finale, two were notated in Microsoft Word, one in Excel, and one has an important PowerPoint component. (I'll talk about the other enclosed pieces in a future post.) Since then, I've discovered OpenOffice and the parallel NeoOffice for Macs. These are useful open-source (free) alternatives to Microsoft Office. NeoOffice works so well on the Mac that I find I usually prefer it to the others.

So those pieces posed no real software dilemmas. I already had and knew those programs, and they did what I needed. (The children's board book didn't involve new software either. That was done by hand.)

In the meantime, I became acquainted with Quark at the magazine office where I worked. I had another piece to write which I realized would have to be a graphic score. There were many tricky layout issues to consider, and it made no sense to try to execute it in any of the programs I was comfortable with already. Boštik was due shortly after I arrived home from a six-week trip in Europe, so I (quite literally) sketched it while I was traveling. Once I got home and figured out the notation, I camped out at the magazine office for several evenings and a couple of weekends, learning Quark enough to notate the piece. I didn't have to fight any battles to put each element where I needed it to be, graphics were easy to import, and the tools I needed were easy to find. For this kind of work, a real layout program was the only solution apart from notating by hand, which I cannot do well.

Friends in the publishing industry told me that Adobe InDesign has become the industry standard for layout programs. I was working at Wellesley College at the time, and found out that there was a great deal available to students, faculty, and staff for Adobe products. I paid just over $300 and got the Adobe Creative Suite (CS3), which includes InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Acrobat Professional.

Then I had to get a computer that would allow me to operate these programs. I was on a small laptop at the time that had a nasty habit of crashing. I needed a larger screen and more power. A friend who knows about these things told me that Apple's certified refurbished computers are as reliable as the new ones, so I got a 24" iMac at a huge savings. It didn't come in a pretty box, but there was no other compromise involved.

Adobe releases CS4 next month. Free trials will also be available. If you're affiliated with a college or university, be sure to go by way of Adobe's education store for a substantial discount. But also check to see if your institution is offering even deeper discounts. Adobe is not shipping CS4 for 30 days, so there is more time to talk about each of the components of the Creative Suite as they might be useful from a notational standpoint. I've thought about using some sort of interactive Flash notation eventually, but for the upcoming discussions I'll keep to the Design Standard package, which is geared towards print: InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat Professional. They have been quite useful to me already.

Two friends asked me if I would be coming back this year to the Donaueschinger Musiktage. I looked at the program, and realized that I couldn't miss it. The offerings are rich and diverse, and some of the programmed composers (Aperghis, Pauset, Johnston) are hugely interesting to me already, in addition to those that I might discover when I'm there. And knowing that I'll have the chance to see some great people I met last year seals the deal.

These days I only have an irregular job, so money is tight. But there are at least two advantages. There is no problem getting away for a bit, and I had time to research the cheapest flights.

Anyone who has been to Donaueschingen knows very well that there is no airport in the area. German rail tickets are only 29 euros between most destinations if you buy them far enough in advance, so I decided to visit some friends in Munich for a few days on the front end of the trip. I've had a great invitation to Freiburg after the festival. Then I found out that trains go directly to the Frankfurt airport, so that makes it a cheaper and easier trip for the return flight.

For the flight search, I had been using Sidestep, which is the most comprehensive search engine for all the standards--Expedia, Travelocity, Hotwire, OneTravel, the airlines, etc. The cheapest flight I could find on Sidestep was $730. That felt like a strain. Then I found cFares. For the same places and cities, I found a flight for $634. I could have gotten that right away, but they also offered a $45 rebate on the ticket if I purchased a one-year $50 platinum membership. That $5 difference is a small price to pay for equivalent rebates for the next twelve months. They have a great interface, and the search took me straight to the booking at this site. When I tried running that same search at lessno, though, I wasn't given the option of a multi-city trip. So cFares was really the only place I could have found that combination.

Another very useful site is Farecast, which will tell you whether to buy now or to wait, based on their assessment of the price trends for that particular combination of cities. I'm eying another trip, but I've been informed with 72% confidence that prices are dropping or steady. Farecast is also a good search engine, and occasionally locates prices that are lower than Sidestep's. But for this particular flight, cFares comes in $42 lower with my new platinum member rebate, and still slightly cheaper ($3) without it. Hopefully Farecast is right and the price will drop further, but it already looks pretty good.

All of these sites are links on bookingbuddy.com, which works very well for everything except multi-city/open jaw trips. Just enter the cities and dates, and click on the tabs for Sidestep, cFares, and farecast. Sidestep includes most of the others, so there is no need to open all 17 windows. That would be a mess. But poke around and see what works best for you. You're likely to save at least $100 off a standard search with a few extra minutes' effort.

While I'm on the subject, flycheapo.com was an invaluable resource last year when I was traveling from city to city in Europe. Flights frequently have base prices of a single pound or euro, and are very often cheaper than train fare. Flycheapo tells you what budget airlines fly any route you look up. There are so many airlines it's impossible to keep track of them all. I used Germanwings, Air Berlin, Ryanair, and EasyJet, and they all worked out just fine for me. Just make sure you don't book your flights at such an early hour that you can't take public transportation to the airport. I speak from experience. My taxi to the nearest bus to London Stansted cost far more than the flight to Stuttgart.

Wegolo is a similar search engine that pulls up prices for budget airline flights worldwide. I don't have much experience with it, but it looks promising. It's especially useful since many of these airlines do not appear on regular search engines.

There we are. That's my longest post to date. But it is important. We are a global community. When we hear each other's work, meet, and collaborate, that community is strengthened. Sometimes it's a financial and logistical ordeal, but these efforts are rewarded in spades.