Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Do you still buy scores?

I mostly agree with everything Kreisler says.

I would also add that I buy a great deal of music in printed form, and hardly ever download and print, regardless of how much cheaper it might be. Actually, if you print on good-quality paper and bind what you print, when you take into account toner and wear-and-tear on the printer, I'm not really sure it is cheaper. The only time I download and print something is when I can't buy it.

I'm lucky to live a bicycle ride from a really good sheet music shop. Unlike wr (if I understand correctly) I often buy music on the basis of how it looks on the printed page, and I'm happy to buy music by unknown composers. To be fair, I've bought some really bad music this way, but I've hit some real winners as well.

Γεία σου πατριώτη!
Μου κάνει καλό να βλέπω άλλοι Ελληνική πιανίστες/συνθέτες.
Εδώ στήν Αμερική δεν υπάρχουν πολλοί, δυστυχώς.

Συνήθως μπορώ να βρω ότι ψάχνω από ιστοσελίδες (π.χ. IMSLP), αλλά υπάρχουν μερικές φορές όταν είναι πιο βολικό να αγοράσω συλλογές σε έντυπη μορφή. Όταν όμως αγοράζω μουσικά βιβλία, είναι συνήθως από γνωστούς συνθέτες. Βρίσκω άγνωστη μουσική στο διαδίκτυο (όταν το γυρεύω).

Musicnotes.com has a pretty good system. Although the audio is not good, at least it is accurate as to the notes and gives you an idea of what the music should sound like.

When you are browsing a title, you are able to print out the first page only, which comes out with "sample" printed across the sheet. You can also only listen to the first page.

Once you buy, it comes with your name printed on the bottom (i.e. for use by Jane Doe only).

I certainly continue to buy scores. They are significantly easier to read than printing scores from on-line sources and in many cases newly edited scores are much more accurate, or in some cases the urtext edition is a huge advantage over the highly edited early 20th Century editions that are in the public domain. For example the new Durand edition of Debussy corrects many of the errors in the original editions (which are the ones available on-line).
As for buying new composers works - I'll do some of that, but not totally on spec. I've usually heard the piece or it's been recommended by others.

I think scores are certainly worth what they cost, given that one is sincerely interested in the work, or terribly curious (There are FEW exceptions). I also believe in supporting composers who are still much alive.

I dislike pdfs a lot, partly because many scans are horrible, the people who scan leave out some pages with relevant information aside from the notes themselves, and my computer is quite slow.

Sometimes composers would actually send me pdfs instead of physical scores because its cheaper, but the files are horribly scanned. I've asked many to please print out good performance scores for me, and 99% of the time that doesn't seem to be a problem.

Thank you all for your suggestions and input.

virtunia: Γειά σου! Ελληνοαμερικάνος φαντάζομαι; Ναι... δυστυχώς, αν και υπάρχουν αρκετοί αξιόλογοι Έλληνες συνθέτες, σπανίζουν στο Ιντερνετ! (translation: Hi! ... yes even if there are plenty of worthy greek composers, they don't hang out the Internet).

Nikallete: Your continuous help is most appreciated! Links, ideas, personal input! Great stuff!

So the general consensous in this thread is:
* Printed scores, even if more expensive, are better than PDFs. (I agree).
* One would very much like to listen to the music before buying. (I also agree, unless we are talking about a composer on whome one can have "blind" (deaf rather) trust!
* You still buy from music sheet stores and very few if any did mention buying straight from the composer or through a trusty website (amazon, lulu, through paypal, etc). (This is tricky, but I agree completely)
* There is a missing link between having composed something and actually presenting a score which is professionally notated. (I do agree and hope that I'm not far off, but still...)

Again huge thanks for the input.

The link isn't missing at all! It's called the editor and engraver.

In fact, here's someone who's making a job of it:

http://www.maslankamusicprep.com/

Heh...

I was talking about the situation where one would do it all on their own! Otherwise I know it's there and I've done the job of the copyist (and editor at the same time) for other composers.

Not only do I buy scores, I insist on the higher quality stuff with good editing (if not urtext) on good quality paper, that is not crowded or otherwise difficult to read...if I'm going to spend any money at all I will spend extra for a quality product.

I'm not interested in digitally available stuff, particularly. Once I spend $30-$40 bucks for a Henle edition of something-or-other, I have it forever in useable form (barring fire, flood or whatever). The same cannot be said of digital media. I'm so tired of having to spend $$$ to "upgrade" every danged item I own every couple of years before it becomes obsolete and worthless, that I'm slowly discontinuing to use a lot of technology where possible in my personal life.

And I work in educational technology!!

The PDF format was never intended for holding scans, which is why it is so horrible if abused this way. Blaming the PDF format for it's users' mistakes is like blaming a car's designers because your car is hard to push when you run out of fuel

The PDF format is designed to store line-vector graphics and, used that way, will produce very high quality prints and screen displays at any magnification.

I don't know if people put scans inside PDFs because

a. They don't understand how PDFs are supposed to work, or
b. They think purchasers won't be able to use the original scans, which will probably be of higher quality, or
c. They want to fool people into thinking they're buying a high-quality line-vector image and not a scan.

Whatever, it's a bad practice, and has exactly the problem show by this post -- bringing a useful and sensible print format into disrepute.

I was thinking the same thing. PDFs look fine if you create them directly from the application, and in my experience, this is what composers usually do. I've never come across a composer who scans their own work - all the ones I know simply create the pdf from within Sibelius or Finale. (Or Lilypond or whatever - creating pdfs is trivial these days given the built-in functionality in Mac OS X or free drivers like pdf995.

Indeed. Or stuff that's been part of Unix/Linux and open-source since about 1985 Nothing new under the sun...

For example (and for anyone interested): http://www.nikolas-sideris.com/stuff/unique.pdf

Made straight from Finale 2009, which is exactly what I do. I don't even have a scanner.

But I still think that I'd charge for a physical copy, rather than a PDF file. It seems somewhat cheating, plus with a (poor quality, ok and with a watermark) PDF file I could let potential customers have a look and feel of the piece, or parts of it.

BTW, Kreisler, the above piece is completely playable (was played by me) and score is laid out on how I played it. No fingering, but I'm not sure that it would be necessary really, for such music.

For those of us who don't compose, who have never used, and who don't feel the need for notation software, the quality of the product produced by Finale (as above), for example, is really quite remarkable. It's far better than the quality of engraved scores of the 19th Century, I believe.

Nikolas :

Just as a point of information : once a work has been composed, how long does it take to produce it? For example, your above-linked work for piano and trumpet; how long did it take to "transcribe" it, per page, in Finale 2009? How user-friendly is such software?

Regards,

Thanks for the comments Bruce! I also think that this particular score is very very nice, indeed! (Printed on a fine laser printer looks even better! :D)

On your question, specifically for this piece: It's very hard to answer, cause it was written in a rather peculiar way, for me!

This piece was largely based on improvisation. The piano part, almost unedited was played live by me. I took out a very small part and that's all. The trumpet was added later on.

So because the midi file was such a huge mess (didn't use a metronome, so it was off beat completely) I had to transcribe everything on paper and THEN copy it to Finale. Transcription took ages. Copying the manuscript to Finale took a few days at most.

Because it was a gift for a friend, who holds the original score and recording (the ones available are very poor copies of the original) I decided to note down my progress of the work, how I composed it, various details and let everyone keep track of the work. The following two threads (in a different forum, sorry), show the development of the piece:
http://www.northernsounds.com/forum/showthread.php?t=65245&highlight=unique (Discussion on the piece)
http://www.northernsounds.com/forum/showthread.php?t=65251&highlight=unique (Discussion on the music itself)

For someone who knows finale (I use it for 11 years now) it's quite easy to reach (semi-)professional results like the above score. You input pitches and duration and the rest is pretty much handled by Finale automatically. Of course this is just the salad. If you want the meat potatoes you have to delve deaper and understand how the program works, what you prefer, what to change, etc.

But, as a rough estimate: If I work full time (eg. 12 hours a day) on COPYING a score from manuscript, I could probably produce 30-40 pages of full score, but not error free, on 3-4 days. Double checking and proof reading should be there for obvious purposes.

Another point about how fast one can work with Finale: A composer, working for Disney was to compose 90 minutes of music for a movie (roughly). In a months time. And he needed someone to transfer midi files and audio files to full orchestral score at the same time. I reckon it could very well be 200-300 pages of full score. I didn't get the gig (which was too bad since the fee would be around $10,000 for such a gig), but I got a very good idea that I would have to abandon everything else and work full time for that.

* Where the word Finale stands you can put Sibelius, possibly Notion. I just happened to use Finale.

As a student at a conservatory, it can be hard to afford all that music sometimes. We would either photocopy the scores from each other, or go to Sibley Music Library across the street.

Here's another resource: www.imslp.org

Enjoy!

Thanks for your post pianoheimer. IMSLP was already mentioned in my initial post in this thread. It's most understandable that students cannot afford to buy scores, or tons of scores anyways, and this is why there is a window in the copyright law about "fair use", which actually is extremely fair! So...

Nikolas, I really like the idea of having at least part of the score available to read through, with the watermark as you've done, then being able to buy a really nice copy if you decide you want it. What probably puts some people off buying expensive scores is their past experience of buying them and finding afterwards it wasn't quite what they thought or wanted. I'm not saying this is my experience exactly, but it could make people more reluctant to spend the money next time.

Oh, and thanks for posting the link to the threads describing the development of the piece. I'm off to read them now

When I taught at a university, I was always amazed at how students could come up with $90 for their music history textbook, $75 for their music theory textbook, $25 for their music theory workbook, $95 for their math textbook, and $55 for their various student activity, rec center, and technology fees, yet complain about having to come up with $50 for Henle Beethoven, a book they'll presumably use for the next half-century of their lives.

Even if you're a poor student on a budget who gets used textbooks, shell out $17 for Dover Beethoven. At Eastman, tuition is tens of thousands of dollars - you'd think they'd be able to budget $100 or so per year for the music they'll play the rest of their lives...

Just say no to low-quality reprints from the 19th-century.

I agree with you that, if they charge us to buy public-domain stuff, it better be worth the money.