Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

Wow, Sunday already!

Sunday, Feb. 15, 2004
5:16 p.m.
I have been oh, so productive today, mostly because both kids were home and hogging the iMac, which means I was glued to the Quadra dutifully copying little black and white notes and making beautiful music beautiful to behold. The orchestra piece is almost finished, thank the gourd. Because I am using an old version of Finale, and staunchly refuse to upgrade for purely technological and Luddite reasons, there are certain things I cannot do (which are possible in newer versions), like put text on a diagonal. So, when we have a harp glissando, the gliss. marking sits nicely horizontal next to the notehead, instead of following along the line. Also, I needed to add some horn swooshes, or �smears�, and constructed them all by myself. But that�s not the worst. (Do I sound like I�m complaining?)

Every-so-often Hubby gets all aleatoric on me and puts fun stuff in the score that would be so easy to draw with my trusty pen and ink in the old days, but which is very time consuming in the digital age. He required that the strings play from boxes filled with squiggles, denoting relative pitches. His pencilled versions were really very cute and evocative. I, on the other hand, had to invent something that looked just like them, while hiding the actual note values, since these boxes are transparent so you can see the staff through them. I think I succeeded. He gave me his approval.

The other thing I absolutely hate copying is unmeasured tremolo, you know, where you have two half-notes in the time of one half-note, connected by a 32nd-beam (or not connected, whatever your preference). It requires inserting a whole bunch of 32nd-notes (and getting them to work out metrically is always an exercise in higher mathematics), invisifying the noteheads and stems of the inner notes, leaving only the desired outer notes, replacing the little black noteheads with nice white ones, and then playing with the beams so that it looks just right. Now that I�m actually writing this down, I think I forgot to flatten one of my E�s and will have to go back later to check it out. Arghhhh!

I have been very good at hoarding my chocolates, and even though Hubby thinks it�s a great idea to offer them to the children (he himself refuses to have any more [mustn�t ruin his girlish figure]), I have so far successfuly hidden them away where my daughter (son doesn�t like dark chocolate) hasn�t found them. Now I must go and make supper for my brood, seeing as how no one else will do it in my stead.

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