Harold-tool
From sketchbook to music stand
From the handwritten notes on paper to the edited score on the orchestra's music stands: what stages does a new symphonic work go through these days? We checked it out for our next creation, Beyond, and put the question to composer Harold Noben.
"My sketchbook remains an indispensable working tools for those parts of the music that I cannot process directly on the computer. So I use it often. Nevertheless, I mainly write with a digital piano keyboard, introducing everything via music notation software (Finale).
On my computer score, I also have additional draft blocks on which I transfer ideas, or different working versions of these ideas, in order to assemble and organise them in the right place in the music. This feature - impossible with a sketchbook - allows me to have an overall view of the result on the score.
Once the text is finished, I edit everything myself in another file, the conductor's part and the instrumental parts separately, which allows me to have another time for rereading and corrections. Ideally, it is always wise, once the whole thing is finished, to have a friend or colleague proofread the score with an outside eye to avoid errors, typos and other details that you can't see yourself when you've had your nose in it for weeks. But often a lack of time does not allow this: a composer who is late is a pleonasm for most of us (smile), and the material has to go through the Music library, which needs to have the time to process it and to pass on the scores to the musicians, especially the principals who are responsible for coordinating all the musical movements (the bow strokes, for example), and the conductor who should have the time to get to grips with the score before the first rehearsals."