Music Notation Software – Pros and Cons for Composers

There are several music notation programmes available for computers and tablets, but the brands that I suspect most composers use are Finale and Sibelius. Another excellent notation product is Notability Pro (for Mac only), which some composers I know swear is the best product out there, and is now free.

In today’s post, I will explore how the use of notation software can affect the composition process, in ways we may not realize, both positive and negative. The first seven points below list many of the unambiguously-positive aspects of using notation software, and the remaining points concern some of the potential challenges that can arise from its use, some of which we may be unaware of.

If any readers can think of pros and cons not listed below, please let me know via the "comments" area, and I'll add them to the list if merited.

Music Notation Software
Pros								Cons (or commentary on pros)
1. Can produce polished, publication-ready scores.								1. This is indeed true. However, it takes considerable skill, and the knowledge of all the minutiae of notation conventions, to produce publication-ready scores, whether one uses notation software or not. Because a score produced with notation software generally looks far better than a hand-copied score (although some highly-skilled hand-copyists can also produce beautiful scores), we may be seduced into thinking our score is as good as it needs to be, when in fact it may need a lot more detailed work to reach a point of being truly publication ready.
2. Scores look better than hand-copied scores.								2. This is generally true. I doubt that many students are trained in the art of hand-copying music any more (I was, which reflects the period in which I was trained (cretaceous)) – but it isn’t always true; a sloppy computer-notated score looks far worse than a beautiful and meticulous hand-copied score. Again, this is more a product of the user's limitations than of the software, however.
3. Pitches and accidentals are notated clearly and correctly.								3. No disadvantages! Here are some of the reasons this is such a valuable advantage for notation software: • Sometimes, in hand-copied scores, pitches are less than 100% clear because they are notated in such as way as to "spill" into the territory of an adjacent pitch. • Notation software also notates 2nds correctly. Sometimes, in a hand-copied score, students attempt to vertically align notes that are a second apart, which looks very messy. • Notation software also aligns accidentals correctly (again, students sometimes try to fit them on top of each other, causing collisions and all manner of visual mayhem).
4. Other score information, such as text and articulations, is clear (hand-written text can be somewhat challenging to read if a composer has poor calligraphy skills).								4. This again is generally true, unless the composer uses a font or font-size that is difficult to read.
5. You can remove or add bars without recopying entire pages. • It is also easier to change/add/remove notes and any other score information (such as dynamics, slurs, articulations, text, etc. • Software also lets you do A/B comparisons, listening to a version with bars added, and then comparing with a version with those bars removed.								5. This is a huge advantage of notation software; having to recopy an entire page by hand in order to add or subtract a few bars is such a hassle that it can become a disincentive to make such changes. Anything that gets in the way of making even small improvements in your compositions is a significant problem. •And yes, the possibility of doing numerous A/B listening comparisons is a tremendous advantage in using notation software.
6. Parts can be generated automatically. • This is a huge advantage in using notation software.								6. Generating parts can still involve some work, however, because you may need to adjust the layout, number of bars per system, fix any new collisions that may have shown up, plan page turns, do any necessary last-minute edits (you sometimes notice problems in parts that you didn't notice in the score), etc. But there's no question that generating parts is a much faster process with notation software.
7. Transpose, Invert, Retrograde, and other commands, as well as plug-ins. • Did you know that Finale has commands for melodic inversion, and retrograde? These (particularly inversion) can be useful when considering possibilities of how to grow/extend/transform a melodic idea. • There are also third-party plugins available, such as Patterson Plug-Ins for Finale,  which are designed to speed up and generally improve workflow.								7. Composers can obviously do these things without a computer, but the computer does them much faster. Plus, having these options so readily available makes it easier to try them in order to see if they can be used in your composition.
8. Dynamics look as they should, and are usually well positioned.								8. Notation software does indeed produce dynamics that are beautiful. • They are not always well positioned however; in Finale, you have probably found many cases where a dynamic collides with something else, such as an accidental, note, or slur, which requires the user to re-position the dynamic, or the other objects with which it collides; I'm not sure this happens as frequently in hand copied scores. • One potential issue to be aware of is that in some software programmes, a dynamic intended for one instrument (e.g., below the flute staff) in an orchestral score can show up in an adjacent instrument's part (e.g., above the clarinet) when parts are generated. When positioning a dynamic, Finale uses a temporary dashed line to indicate the note to which the dynamic is attached, which reduces the likelihood of misplaced dynamics. • There are potential playback issues in the use of dynamics, described in section 9.
9. You can hear what you write as you write it, performed at the indicated tempo, or at a slower tempo if you prefer, which allows you to listen repeatedly, carefully, and critically. • You can also hear and evaluate any indicated tempo changes (including rit. and accel.), and dynamic levels (including cresc. and dim.). • You can also listen to the composition, or a section thereof, repeatedly, tweaking it until it sounds as good as you can make it, no matter what time of day you play it, and no matter what your mood is.								9. Being able to hear an approximation of what you write in real time is a huge benefit of notation software. • There are, however, significant issues or limitations in relying too heavily on MIDI playback as a realistic indicator of what your music will sound like; these include: Unwittingly writing parts that are either extremely difficult or even unplayable, because the computer plays them without any problem whatsoever (!). A computer plays unidiomatic lines flawlessly, while a performer might struggle in attempting to play them, or even refuse to play the piece. The computer can lull the user into thinking that the line is perfectly idiomatic, when in fact it is extremely difficult or even impossible. I am not sure how much different this would be in a hand-copied score, but in producing a hand-copied score, a composer usually spends hours playing each line, usually on a piano, which might flag any such issue; Balance problems: The balance in a MIDI ensemble is often not very realistic;  Further to  balance problems, sometimes, in an attempt to bring out a line that is insufficiently prominent, we may temporarily give it an extreme dynamic boost, such as marking it fff instead of f, so we can hear it better in the MIDI playback, but then forget to change the dynamic to its correct value (fff back to f) before giving the parts to the performers, resulting in performers blasting the heck out of that line in the first rehearsal, when all we intended was for it to be more prominent than the lines around it. Or sometimes, an inexperienced composer may use an extreme dynamic boost (e.g., f to fff) intentionally, thinking it necessary to bring out the line to the desired level, perhaps not realizing that if a line is marked  f, while the other instruments are marked mf, the performers and/or conductor will make sure that the f line is heard more prominently than the others. It is also possible that the previous example (extreme dynamic boost) might be the result of poor orchestration; if a musical line is insufficiently prominent in MIDI playback, perhaps it needs to be reinforced in some way (e.g., octave doublings, or the addition of other instruments to that line), or perhaps the material around it is too busy and needs to be thinned out in some way. Unrealistic representation of the nuanced colour and dynamic changes in different registers of an instrument or voice;  MIDI playback is only as good as the quality of the samples  in your computer's sound-bank.  Glissandi, heard through MIDI playback, usually elicits a chuckle from class members, presumably because it often sounds so unrealistic or even ridiculous. The computer will play any glissando, even impossible ones, which may entice composers into writing impossible glissandi. We need to be aware of the possible glissandi for different instruments; always show your work to a performer of that instrument to be sure.
10. Copy and Paste. • Musical material, from the smallest ideas to entire sections, is often repeated, either immediately or brought back later; the Copy & Paste functions let you do this with great ease.								10. Again, a very useful tool. I recommend exercising some restraint in its use, however. • One of the most wonderful attributes of great classical compositions is that ideas are often altered in some way when repeating or recapitulating them. This provides both the comfort of familiarity, since we recognize the ideas, but also an element of surprise, if we recognize that some aspects have been changed. • You can make such modifications when repeating ideas in notation programmes, of course, but, at least in student work, it seems as though the ease with which the paste command can be executed often leads to not making modifications. • My advice to students is to explore modification possibilities when re-using (pasting) an earlier idea into a later section.
11. Other limitations and challenges.								11. Using different metres in different staves simultaneously, and having bar lines that don't necessarily line up with each other (vertically).
12. Other limitations and challenges.								12. Using a time grid at the top of your score (e.g., a grid in 5 second increments), with no bar lines. • You can hide bar lines, of course, and create a graphic to represent the time grid, but this involves more work than it would if done by hand.
13. Other limitations and challenges.								13. Graphic notation can be difficult or even impossible. • Again, you can create graphics on a computer, but it takes some skill to do this well, and doing it by hand is often faster.
14. Other limitations and challenges.								14. Oversize metres in orchestral scores (e.g., a large 4/4 that spans the height of the entire woodwind section) are either impossible or very tricky. Oversize metres are generally much appreciated by conductors, because they can be easily read at a glance. When my orchestral music has been played, I often get the score back with oversize metre changes written in by the conductor.
15. Other limitations and challenges.								15. Unless you invest in an expensive sample library that includes extended techniques in all instrument families, your MIDI playback will probably not be able to reproduce such sounds. This is not necessarily an impediment to using extended techniques, but I suspect they would be used more if we could hear a reasonably-accurate reproduction of these techniques during playback of our scores. These performance techniques include: col legno, col legno battute, sul pont., sul tasto, different mute types for brass instruments, hand-stopped notes (for horn), play with bells in the air, multiphonics, flutter-tongue, harmonics, harmonic gliss. ("seagull effect") for strings (particularly for cello), senza vibrato, scraping sound created by heavy bow pressure and slow bow speed, a myriad of sounds available by slapping, scraping, muting, picking (with a guitar pick) strings inside of a piano, prepared piano sounds, etc.

Have I missed any significant advantages or disadvantages in my list? Are there times when you feel the notation software is pushing you to notate an idea in the way that it wants, as opposed to the way that you want? Please let me know in the comments section below, and thanks for reading!

Judge Me By My Composition, Do You? (Part One)

Today's title is a reference to Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980), in which Yoda famously says, "Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm?"

Indeed, while many would probably agree that it is unfair to judge people by their size, and as Star Wars viewers knew, Yoda's mastery of The Force meant it was clearly a mistake to dismiss him based on his extraordinarily-diminutive stature (not to mention his peculiar sentence constructions), it seems to be a fairly common practice in the world.   Basketball and North American football coaches routinely consider size when choosing players for their teams, although they presumably take other factors into consideration as well, such as speed, and sport-specific skills.  According to some studies, in American presidential elections, "candidates that were taller than their opponents [usually] received more popular votes."  Other studies have suggested it is a factor in mate selection, and advancement in the corporate world.

Judging people based on their height is clearly unjustified in most instances (even in sports there are numerous examples of great athletes that happen to be shorter than average), but judging people based on other factors is a frequent practice that can often be justified.  Picking the best candidate for a particular job entails evaluating numerous factors specific to the execution of that job.  Selecting the best university for you, choosing friends, clothes, books to read, and music to hear — these all involve an evaluation process of some kind, even if we are not consciously aware of it.

In music, we routinely make judgements.  We do this if we prefer one performer's recording of Beethoven over another's.  Some people love Bob Dylan's voice; some people can't stand it.  I recently met someone who claimed to dislike all songs by Paul McCartney, but many regard him as the most successful songwriter in history (Google "the most successful songwriter in history" and see what you get).  I have participated in numerous performance "juries" wherein a panel of faculty members assess student performances, but I have always been aware that there is some subjectivity involved in giving a fair and balanced assessment of what I heard.  Different people can evaluate the same performance in slightly (or sometimes greatly) differing ways.

That said, I suspect that evaluating a performance of a two-century-old sonata by Beethoven is a more objective exercise than evaluating a brand new composition.  People familiar with a particular work notice immediately if wrong notes are played, and judge the performance to be flawed, even if it was otherwise very musical.  A performance lacking in "feeling" or "expression" — which may mean that the performance lacks dynamic nuances, subtle tempo alterations such as rubato or rallentandi, or the shaping of phrases — is usually judged to be weaker than a performance with these qualities, although too much of them may be said to be "in poor taste."  But how does a listener judge the performance of a new composition?  How does the listener of a new work know which are the right notes, and which are wrong?

The question is rhetorical; if the listener is unfamiliar with the work, they can't know.  However, the listener may be able to guess that some notes don't seem right based on an understanding of a composer's style, or even based on inconsistencies within a work.

How does a composer know which notes to use, and when to use them?  We make thousands of decisions during the composition process, and we don't always know why we make some choices and reject others, beyond liking or disliking them.  One way to justify compositional choices is to adopt a systematic approach, such as motivic unity, motivic expansion, using existing forms (such as sonata), any of various "-isms" (serialism, spectralism, minimalism), tonality, free atonality, polychords, or any of Messiaen's techniques such as modes of limited transposition, non-retrogradable rhythm, and added-value rhythms.

But whether you adopt a more-systematic or less-systematic approach, all of these approaches involve choices, or judgements, and good composers presumably make better choices than less-good composers.  The composition process involves continually evaluating the music we write, ideally until we reach the point where in our estimation we are unable to make it any better in the time allotted; at this point, the work is done.

To revise or to let it go?

A quick digression:  If we never review and revise the work we do, we are unlikely to write the highest quality music of which we are capable.  If we constantly revise, then the composition will never be finished.  Somewhere between those two extremes is the happy medium that every composer needs to find.  Deadlines help us in finding this happy (or at least practical) medium…

And so, to answer the question posed in the title of this blog, I don't know the degree to which people are, or should be, judged by their compositions; judging a person's compositional abilities based on their compositions seems fair enough, but judging a person's character based on their compositions seems more problematic, although it could be argued that a person's compositions tell us something about that person's character.

In part two, I will suggest twenty specific ways of critiquing compositions, particularly your own.

Marketing Contemporary Music (1)

More food for thought: Marketing Contemporary Music (article by Greg Sandow in the New York TImes; click link to view entire article).

The following is taken from the end of Mr. Sandow's article. Please read and leave a comment below, if this topic interests you:

… There really is an alternative new-music audience, one that is hardly connected to classical music at all.

     The beacon for this view of contemporary music would be Bang on a Can, a sharply informal New York group that is presented by Lincoln Center (and might even play thoroughly classical music by Elliott Carter), but does not look, feel, taste or smell like a classical institution, and in fact refuses to think of itself as part of the classical-music world. It draws 1,000 people to its annual new-music marathons, and these, said its director of development, Christine Williams, are in their 20's and 30's, attracted in part by aggressive marketing aimed at lovers of downtown dance, jazz, visual art and performance art.

     In Milwaukee, an enterprising contemporary group, Present Music -- which gets up to 700 people at some of its events and impressively sells more than 200 subscriptions to its six-concert season -- has a similar philosophy. "You can look down from the stage, and see the earrings and nose rings and different- colored hair," said its director, Kevin Stalheim. "If I were going for mailing lists, I'd go to the art museum and modern dance companies, not the Milwaukee Symphony."

     Present Music plays more traditional programs than Bang on a Can, ranging from mildly alternative composers like Henryk Gorecki and Steve Reich to mainstream stalwarts like Joseph Schwantner and Harrison Birtwistle. Why doesn't New York's alternative audience -- the people, for instance, who enjoy going to the Brooklyn Academy of Music -- come to hear similar programs at Carnegie Hall?

     One big part of the answer is presentation. "We did a piece with black light, and we threw Ping-Pong balls around in the audience" Mr. Stalheim said. "We start our season like opening day at the ballpark, and maybe we'll play 'The Star-Spangled Banner' on a theremin. We try to end our concerts with parties." This is not selling out, Mr. Stahlheim insists, because most of the time the group is serious. But it gives his concerts good press and makes them fun.

     Nonesuch Records cultivates its own version of this alternative audience, and has done wonderfully, sometimes selling more than 100,000 copies of CD's by Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Astor Piazzola and the Kronos Quartet, and only slightly less of John Adams. This, says Robert Hurwitz, who runs the label, is a market that was already there, one that overlaps with the classical-music audience but is also distinct from it, and which Nonesuch's vice president of marketing, Peter Clancy, described as "people open to the new, different and unusual, who seek out world music, modern and ethnic dance, and performance art." This, perhaps, is a contemporary version of the "intellectual audience" Virgil Thomson identified among classical-music listeners in New York in the 1940's, and the success of Nonesuch suggests that it might be bigger, at least potentially, than anybody thinks.

     Can mainstream classical-music institutions attract these people? The enterprising Albany Symphony has placed composers in elementary and high schools and also presents an alternative new-music ensemble -- the Dogs of Desire -- at local colleges, thus using contemporary music to give the orchestra new roots in its community.

     Mr. Wyjnbergen, of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, thinks he might present new music in "rock clubs, art galleries or an old factory that has been rigged up." He doesn't expect to attract younger people to the orchestra's existing programs, but instead hopes to include them by extending the Philharmonic's reach. He also identifies another "niche audience" for contemporary music, made up of "visual people, architects, painters, photographers and graphic artists." These, he thinks, he can attract by asking 40 of them to create visual impressions of contemporary musical works.

     Mr. Pastreich, too, says he has tapped an alternative crowd when the San Francisco Symphony presents "maverick" composers like Lou Harrison or Meredith Monk. And while he says that 90 percent of his new-music listeners are drawn from his regular audience, he also notes that younger people are now buying tickets, thanks to the informality and commitment of Michael Tilson Thomas.

     Should we be trying to educate the classical music audience, as my colleague so strongly urged? Why talk as if there's something wrong with it, as if it has a disease that needs curing? Instead, let's arouse it, excite it and draw new people to new kinds of artistic musical events. That way, even large institutions might renew themselves and heal the split between contemporary classical music and the rest of the arts.

What do you think?
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If you like Mr. Sandow's writing, please check out some of the many links to his other articles on his home page.

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See my next post, Marketing Contemporary Music (2) for my thoughts on this topic.

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UPDATE: Both links above have been fixed (Jan, 2023).  I also considerably expanded the portion of Mr. Sandow's original article quoted above.

"Audiences Hate Modern Classical Music Because Their Brains Cannot Cope"

According to an article in The Telegraph (UK), "audiences hate modern classical music because their brains cannot cope."

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NB: The above link appears to be accessible only by pay, although the website may allow a certain number of visits before demanding payment, so it's worth trying, If you are asked to pay but do not wish to do so, click this link to my follow-up post on this topic; it should give you a sense of what the Telegraph's article is about:

On the "hatred" of modern classical music due to the brain's inability to cope…

It's a provocative headline and an interesting point of view. Have a look at the article, and, if you feel so moved, please share your thoughts about it in the "comments" area below.   I will post a blog with my views next week.

• Do you agree or disagree with points of view expressed in the article? 
• Do audiences "hate" modern classical music? 
• Who exactly are these "audiences" to which the article refers?   
• Is it generally true that modern classical music is complex (and is therefore hard or even impossible to process for the brain)? 
• If it is true that the brain cannot process highly-complex music, does that mean that we should aim to keep things simple when composing?

"Funky Flute Groove Experience"

[N.B. This blog entry is about 1.5 years old, from THURSDAY, AUGUST 07, 2008.  The reason I re-posted it here is that the site that hosted my original composition blog was shut down, and this was the only post from my original comp blog that had not already migrated over to this one.]

This morning [AUGUST 07, 2008] I finished editing the guitar track to my most recent composition, Funky Flute Groove Experience. which I will refer to by its abbreviation (FFGE) for the rest of this post.

The above link will take you to the programme note and recording of this piece, but a brief background is that I wrote it for Christine Gangelhoff (flutist) and electronics, to be performed at the most recent Newfoundland Sound Symposium (July, 2008). Christine and I had asked a local DJ/turntablist (DJ Russtafari) to be involved in this too, but we learned a few weeks before the performance that he had moved to Korea, and, incredibly, was not planning to commute back to St. John's for the performance! What was up with that?

Another part of the original plan was to have me play guitar on the piece, but, as the performance date got nearer, I started getting cold feet because (a) I don't perform much, (b) I am not confident in my abilities as a guitarist, and (c) I was spending all my time composing the piece and had no time to learn a guitar part.

Or so I thought…

Christine, who had been expecting to perform FFGE as part of a trio (with DJ Russ and myself) called "Urban Sound Collective," was now facing the prospect of playing solely with the electronic accompaniment, and was a tad disappointed. Kind of hard to call yourself a collective when there's only one performer, I guess...

I therefore decided, in a moment of compassion/rashness, to follow through with my original plan and create a guitar part for the piece (which was otherwise about 95% finished, but had zero notes for guitar), and to (eek!) perform it too. I second-guessed that decision a few times (which I guess means I third-, fourth-, and fifth-guessed it), but the good news is that it worked out very well; I am happy with the part I ended up writing, and I wasn't nervous at all while playing it, probably because it was largely improvised, and memorized. 

 And, as it turned out, we were able to find another DJ/turntablist in Deb Sinha, who was here for a performance during the Newfoundland Sound Symposium. Mr. Sinha very graciously agreed to step in at the last minute and did a fine job. And so Urban Sound Collective was a trio after all, and all went well! Or, if "well" is overstating matters, then at least nobody was injured during the performance, and safety is our number 1 concern! Just kidding; my number 1 concern was to make sure the performance went well, and it did.

I guess the fact that I took a risk and didn't have it blow up in my face emboldened me to try recording the guitar part myself. I had never edited digital audio before (hard to believe, I know, in this day and age!) and so was apprehensive about the process; the fact that I was using a 10-year-old Mac G4 that crashes about twice a day did not inspire confidence. It took a couple of hours to get everything set up — I was temporarily stymied because I don't have a microphone preamp (necessary to boost the signal strength from 'mic level' to 'line level'). The microphone (used to pick up the guitar amplifier) had been connected directly to the digital audio processor (MOTU 2408MkII) but I couldn't figure out how to boost the signal (as I said, I was a complete novice at this!), so I routed it through my mixer and applied gain to the signal there. It took a ridiculous amount of time (the more time it took, the less inspired I felt), but once things were set up properly the process of recording was very straightforward.

I ended up spending hours recording and editing the guitar track — you can move individual notes a few milliseconds (or a lot of milliseconds) forwards or backwards until they are exactly where you want them, but it's a painstaking (and simultaneously amazing) process. I took several runs at the guitar solo (in the last two choruses of the minor blues that occurs around the middle) and the rhythm, quite frankly, is still a bit loose, but I eventually left it as is because it didn't feel too out of character for the piece.

Here is a recording:

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Postscript: I submitted this to MacJams.com, where it has received comments from members of that on-line community. Click here if you would like to read them. 

Post-postscript: MacJams.com went belly up, so reading comments by the MacJams community on this piece is no longer an option. People really liked it, which was gratifying.

Domenico 1° & 2°

I spent the first weeks of spring/summer finishing a chapter for an upcoming book, entitled Weinzweig; Essays on his Life and Music, edited by John Beckwith and Brian Cherney. I had spent parts of the previous two years working on that project, but I was very glad to learn more about the music of one of the truly great icons of Canadian music. I may elaborate on this in future blogs.

Having finished the chapter meant I could focus my energies on composing music once again, and the first project I gleefully tackled was a solo piano piece inspired by Domenico Scarlatti for my friend and colleague, Kristina Szutor.

In early 2010, Dr. Szutor recorded a CD of contemporary piano works inspired by the Italian Baroque composer, Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), and she had asked me to compose something for that disc. The name for the CD is Après Scarlatti. Other composers represented on this CD are Clifford Crawley, Dennis Farell, Norman Dello Joio, Marcel Bitsch, Marcelle de Manziarly, and Marc-André Hamelin.

I wasn't quite sure of how to go about writing a contemporary piece based on Scarlatti's music at first, but, as with so many initially-perplexing ideas in life, once I began to delve more deeply into it I discovered there was much to work with. I soon became quite excited by the project and ended up enjoying the experience very much (which doesn't always happen when I compose).

So much so, in fact, that when I was finished I decided to write another. Part of my rationale in composing a second work was a familiarity with musicologist/harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick's claim that the great majority (almost 400) of Scarlatti's 555 sonatas were written in pairs¹ (and they are often performed this way), so it seemed somewhat anomalous to be composing an azygous Scarlatti-influenced sonata. ;)

As I subsequently learned, however, more recent scholarship (notably by W. Dean Sutcliffe, in The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and Eighteenth-Century Musical Style, Cambridge University Press, 2003) has challenged Kirkpatrick's claim,² so it really came down to my feeling that having completed one, it would be fun to write another.

My introduction to Scarlatti's music came through learning guitar transcriptions of his sonatas, and one of the most popular of these amongst guitarists is K. 208 (L. 238) in A major (listen to a performance by Leo Brouwer here). Two of the most pervasive characteristics of that sonata are the steady, repeated, quarter notes in the left hand, and the flowing melody in the right hand with frequent syncopations; these ideas formed the basis of Domenico 1°. The working title for this piece was originally "Domenico Daybreak," and perhaps this will make sense if you hear it (click the "play" arrow in the audio player below; if it doesn't work, click here instead).

The great majority of Scarlatti's professional life was spent on the Iberian peninsula, most of it in Spain, where he had five children, composed the majority of his single-movement harpsichord sonatas, and became familiar with flamenco music, the influence of which can be heard in some of his sonatas.

I had therefore planned Domenico 2° as a kind of fantasy based on flamenco-like scales (for example, phrygian mode with the possibility of raised third and seventh degrees), but I decided to make it an even-more overt homage to Scarlatti by quoting four bars of his Sonata in B minor (K. 27, which I transposed to A minor) that use a chord progression known as a "fandango," much associated with the music of Spain: Am - G - F - E, in 3/4 time. This quoted passage is also remarkable for the use of hand-crossings (left hand crossing above the right), an uncommon technique for the time it was written, and I based several other sections of my composition on Scarlatti's fandango material as well.

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<sup>1. Ralph Kirkpatrick, Domenico Scarlatti, (Princeton University Press, 1983), 143: "385 sonatas [were] indubitably arranged in pairs… not intended to be performed separately… The real meaning of many a Scarlatti sonata becomes much clearer once it is reassociated with its mate.… The relationship between the sonatas of a pair is either one of contrast or of complement. The sonatas that bear a complementary relationship to each other may share a certain overall unity of style or of instrumental character or they may be composed in the same harmonic color. In the contrasting pairs, a slow movement may be followed by a fast; a simple movement, generally slow, may serve as an introduction to a more elaborate; or an elaborate and concentrated movement may be followed by a simpler and lighter movement, for example a Minuet, which serves as a kind of Nachtanz.↩
2. "Not a single detailed commentary exists in support of any particular pair. Instead we find gestures towards opening thematic connections or an outlining of the sort of broad relationships defined by Kirkpatrick." (p. 368)↩
3. Sectional repeats are observed in this recording of Domenico 2° (but not in Domenico 1°).</sup>