Music Pubisher Software

[John Ruggero]

Brahms obviously had no problem with curvy slurs, either...

Yes, you are in good company, Daniel. Of course, Brahms had the worst music handwriting of any known composer and proudly so.

Beethoven also used highly exaggerated slurs in his manuscripts of the piano sonatas; at times one wonders if it was a way of making them very visible to the engravers. At others, it looks like the emotion of the music is influencing the slur.

Ah, the days of yore when music was engraved with little bits of type as opposed to bits and bytes.

[benwiggy]

If you want to see extreme non-curviness in a notation guide check out the Button/Elgar book "System in Musical Notation" from 1919.

Novello's style is instantly recognisable and a law unto itself. A lot of it is moveable type, rather than engraving: you can certainly see the joints in those slurs. (They always left a little gap after the last barline of every system.)

[John Ruggero]

Movable type music engraving example from Schenker's Harmonielehre:

Schenker Harmonie.jpeg (349.12 KiB) Viewed 4687 times

[Tokkemon]

Just to jump in: from my time at Carl Fischer and Theodore Presser, it was a mix of Sibelius, Finale, and SCORE. The two older editors used SCORE for most scores they did themselves, though Sibelius was also prominent. Finale used to be far more prominent, especially in the band and choral sphere, but after a few years the whole engraving team moved to Sibelius for pretty much everything. The trickiest part was making sure the house style was somewhat consistent across all the programs and that the fonts weren't messed up between Mac/Windows and the different programs. For example: Carl Fischer uses Maestro Wide for almost all its scores now, despite them being in Sibelius, with Times or Minion Pro. Presser used New Century Schoolbook and Maestro, though I made a push for both companies to move to Bravura. I was only partially successful.

[OCTO]

Carl Fischer uses Maestro Wide for almost all its scores now, despite them being in Sibelius, with Times or Minion Pro.

So basically they ported Maestro to Sibelius?

[Tokkemon]

Carl Fischer uses Maestro Wide for almost all its scores now, despite them being in Sibelius, with Times or Minion Pro.

So basically they ported Maestro to Sibelius?

Yes, I believe the mapping is similar enough that it just works. Sometimes you have to move the odd symbol but that's rare.