Grateful testimony

• Aug 15, 2019 - 17:28

I finally finished the composition of my Sinfonietta, a thirteen minute work for large orchestra, and I am extremely grateful (and indebted) to MuseScore and its team of developers and supporters. I'll post a link after its premiere on Sept 13, 2019.
While I've been using MuseScore for several years, the improvements released this year have had a strong impact in its usage as an aid for composition. Not only the superb rendering of sheet music, but the possibility to actually play the music with a more than reasonable and controllable resemblance to a real performance!
The following features are really invaluable:
1) The autoplacement feature. It allowed, for instance, to produce a professionally looking edition of 34 different parts in less than a day of work (most welcome when the deadline is knocking on the door).
2) The high quality of the General Soundfont (notice I'm not referring to the HQ version, but the normal one). This yields an out-of-the-box solution for most of the composer's needs. Like having at our disposal a real orchestra to test passages, timbral combinations, experiment textures, etc. Luxury!
3) The possibility to resort to other soundfonts to complement those sounds that are still lacking.
4) Single note dynamics. There are no words to describe the happiness of being able to listen to the music coming to life with this single feature!
5) The possibilty to add custom tempo changes and mimic what human performers do.
6) The extreme flexibility to tweak so many parameters that the very few things that cannot still be done with out-of-the-box features can be accomplished as workarounds.
7) Last but not least, the unbelievable and marvelous support system and the incredible people behind it: Marc Sabatella, JoJo Schmitz, mike320, among many others!


Comments

Thank you for the kind words and I agree with your assessment of the current version of MuseScore. I look forward to hearing your opus. I hope the link includes a YouTube video of its live performance.

Congratulations.

Nowadays it is not an easy task even for a normal musician to compose and complete a large piece of music (because we are in an age of speed and we can easily change interests).

I hope we get a chance to listen to the performance. 🙏

Thank you all for your comments on my comments. I really meant every single word. I'll share both the recording and MuseScore's rendering after its premiere (this was a condition when the work was commissioned so I must honor it). Just one more detail: when I showed the MuseScore audio export to a friend who uses Sibelius, he was quite surprised by the quality of the rendering and praised it.

Finally my two-movement "Sinfonietta de los mártires" (Martyrs' Sinfonietta) has been successfully premiered yesterday by the Rosario Povincial Symphony Orchestra (Rosario, Argentina). The (outstanding) MuseScore rendering can be heard at

https://www.fceia.unr.edu.ar/~fmiyara/music/Sinfonietta_I_mov.mp3
https://www.fceia.unr.edu.ar/~fmiyara/music/Sinfonietta_II_mov.mp3

These files have been rendered using the normal MuseScore Soundfont (not HQ) with MuseScore 3.2. Nearly no tempo changes have been used. Single note dynamics have been used profusely. I hope I can include a link to the real performance as well.

Once more, my gratitude for this great program, which made this possible!

In reply to by Ziya Mete Demircan

Thanks for listening! No, it isn't dodecaphonic; and it does have several recognizable (and even singable) melodies, such as the main motive of movement I, presented after the opening orchestral hit, or the main theme of movement II, presented by the oboe. I would call them free melodies, since they have some features from both tonal and atonal styles. In contrast to the classic form, In the first movement I present and develop parts (motives) of the main theme and delay its full exposition until close to the end (5:21) where it is presented as the subject of a fugato. I resort to dissonant harmonies and textures since the work is dramatic in character.

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