NOTATIO

What is the piece? A new contemporary composition called "No dot" for a cappella?

I found this https://www.holmen.com/en/paper/support ... sing-dots/ infos about missing dots

Still waiting for a reply from the publishers: it's Novello.

And in the same concert programme, another piece from Novello, dated 2002, by a major 20thC composer, which they published as a hand-written manuscript. I can only assume it's the composer's hand or his amanuensis, because God help them if they paid a copyist for that. And if they had a budget for a hand copyist, why not get it engraved?

I sang from an OUP piece recently that was also 'published' just as the composer's autograph, to no advantage.

Also a piece by a significant living composer from Peters, also dated 2002, which is the worst piece of engraving from a commercial publisher I've seen. All the ties are slurs!! The dynamics symbols are set in a text font, sometimes roman and sometimes italic (with no reason to the alternation). There are no word extensions, and the lyrics crash into each other and low-hanging fruit. Hyphens are inserted randomly.

If you bought a novel, or even a newspaper, and it was written out by hand; or set with badly spaced type, crashing into one another, and no capital letters and fullstops: you'd kick up a fuss and ask for your money back. I'm absolutely appalled.

OK, these works are up to 20 years old: but Sibelius was well-established in publishers' offices by then.
If these major players had neither the margin nor the diligence to produce decent, readable scores, then that's a truly sad indictment. Say what you like about the default output of any of the notation apps available: I'd take that over the excrement offered by supposedly professional outfits that I currently have to sing from.

Rant ends.

When I recently offered a string quartet parts newly typeset in Finale for a piece of mine they premiered in 1994 from my hand copied parts, they declined, saying they'd prefer to use the old parts. I don't think it would have taken long to transfer their markings to smart new parts, so I'm not sure why they made this choice.

benwiggy wrote: ↑04 Mar 2020, 11:31 Also a piece by a significant living composer from Peters, also dated 2002, which is the worst piece of engraving from a commercial publisher I've seen. All the ties are slurs!! The dynamics symbols are set in a text font, sometimes roman and sometimes italic (with no reason to the alternation). There are no word extensions, and the lyrics crash into each other and low-hanging fruit. Hyphens are inserted randomly.

New to engraving for music publishers, I contacted Peters, among others, offering my services. But, as expected, they showed no interest. "Too bad", I thought, "there was a really fat chance passing me by!" Well, well, now I'm not so sure.

Then something sure is going on with the publishers, maybe they are looking for a profitable solution, who knows, though, all of the above is very, very strange ...

What I can only guess is that there was a problem with the printing machines. So they printed several thousand copies and than sent them to the stores.

Whatever the reason for the failures mentioned, my impression is that some big publishers have a rather off-handed approach towards their engravers. My guess is that those are sorted in a class A and class B. Leaving me to guess that, if you belong in the latter category, you may get an offer like: "We can pay you 500 $ for this 60 minutes symphonic work that is of no major importance to us. Never mind petty details like collisions and the look of things. Just get it done. Next Monday."

I'm quite happy with my local Scandinavian clients.

OCTO wrote: ↑05 Mar 2020, 17:01 What I can only guess is that there was a problem with the printing machines. So they printed several thousand copies and than sent them to the stores.

Now and again it happens that the level of powder in my toner is getting low. Then it prints everything badly, not just dots. So, you would have to have a very selective printer to leave out the dots exclusively. Thinking of which, is there anyone who knows of a printer which refuses to print really bad music?

I have a printer that once printed a Finale file (actually PDF) so that all horizontal lines were dashed. No other lines nor curves were affected. So all staff lines were dashed for instance and all other horizontal lines su h as pedal lines or so. I don't remember how I fixed it. Yes, it can happen that a certain dot size cannot be printed out, because the printer doesn't feel like.