Éric Dussault wrote:
> I was just reading this new book and some ideas expressed by mr. Powell urge
> me to get the opinion of you people on this list.
> I first have to say that there are a lot of interesting things in this book.
> The staff sizes chart at the beginning is one good example. I would have
> appreciated that he omitted some personal comments (some about SCORE for
> example are quite funny but undeserved) here and there because its does give
> an « amateur » style to it. I am citing the part where I ask for your
> opinions :
> « Good engraving is almost always tight engraving. It may be tempting, when
> you are getting paid per page (the method most publishers use) to space
> music generously to create extra pages, but you should resist the urge.
> Tighly spaced music is easier to read, as more information is readily
> available for the eye (...) »
>
> What about people who just want their music to look good. Most of my clients
> are billed on an hourly rate, which I think is a lot more fair. I do
> whatever I think is good for the music. Before reading this I was already
> noticing that the examples in the book were often damn tight (sometimes a
> couple of measures too many for a system) for my own taste, which may be
> discutable. But the problem with Finale spacing is that it becomes uglier as
> the music is becoming tighter. Am I silly or what?
>
I haven't gotten that far into the book, but I think that BOTH you and
Steve are right -- I agree with Steve that given two different layouts,
I most often like the tighter layout with more music per page.
However, I also agree with you that the music has to look good, and that
if in your professional opinion a tighter layout is not good (I can
think of many older orchestral works which are way too tight, along with
many early-20th-century band transcriptions of orchestral works which
are also way too tight), then you should add some space.
Ultimately, in my opinion, the layout of the music has to present the
right combination of information with the right visual impression to
make the music easiest to play. Can I codify that any more
specifically? No, I can't. It is one of those "I can't define it but I
know what I like" situations. And that, in my opinion as well, is one
of the things that our clients pay us for -- our expertise in layout issues.
--
David H. Bailey
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