Notating Dennis

This is a nice way to present the score. (By the way, the fourth chord in the second system is missing its sharps.)

KG replies: Thanks. I could let the accidentals carry over, but I'm trying to be consistent.

For the Sibelius question you can go to House Style > Engraving Rules. Within the Engraving Rules window that comes up, select Staves. There is an option which says "Justify staves when page is at least" [number box] "% full." The default is 65%. If you change that number to 100% it surpress all of the auto-formatting which should let you put all the notes where you want. I've used it for graphic notation before and I think it works quite well. Hope that helps!

KG replies: Hmmm. I'e used that to defuse the default for vertical staff-spacing, but I didn't think it had any effect on the spacing of notes along a horizontal axis. Am I missing something?

What a great work! Both the composer's and yours, redoing the composition, in some way.

Has the composer given any directions as to what he considers an authentic performance of the piece?

KG replies: All he'll say is that the recording must be taken as the most authoritative document.

"(If there's a way to make Sibelius absolutely proportional, I'd love to hear it.)"

I don't know about absolute, but if you put in a dummy voice of straight values, say 8ths or 16ths, then mute it and hide it, it will force the spacing to be better.

KG replies: Thanks, I tried it, and it did straighten things up a bit - but also revealed that my spacing was already pretty close, since not much shifted. I can hide the notes on the extra staff, but not the extra staff itself. I might mention that I'm still on Sibelius *2*, having grown up with it as a boy and sworn to my mother that I would never forsake it.

What really amazes me about these 5 & 6 minute clips is that they seem to last only 2 or 3 minutes when listening. I can't recall any other music that so plays with my time sense. You said in an earlier post about another piece by someone else that was hours long something along the lines of, "Is that all?" when it was over.

Makes me wonder if inducing a time sense altered state is a stated goal of very slow music, or just a side effect. And that made me wonder if there's anything like a text or manifesto laying out the nature of this new music and what it's trying to do. I'd been assuming it was mostly art for art's sake.

That this piece was written in the 50's is astonishing. Your bringing it is back a wonderful piece of work. Thanks again for making it available.

"I can hide the notes on the extra staff, but not the extra staff itself. I might mention that I'm still on Sibelius *2*,..."

I get around that by inputtng the dummy voice as Voice 2 in one of the other staves. Then you can hide only that voice. However, then you can't mute it. I get around that, if I need MIDI playback of the file, by saving an "audio" version of it before I put in the dummy voice, and only use the latter version for printing.

I am also running Sibelius 2. I bought the upgrade to 4, even installed it, in fact, even talked them into letting me have both versions on one computer. But I never run 4. All of my Sibelius work-arounds are based on Version 2.

Art

Lyle Sanford mentioned "What really amazes me about these 5 & 6 minute clips is that they seem to last only 2 or 3 minutes when listening. I can't recall any other music that so plays with my time sense."

Time dilation seems a central effect of much minimalist and postminimalist music. It happens when I listen to Morton Feldman's String Quartet No. 2, also Steve Reich's Music For 18 Instruments and Violin Phase and Piano Phase, also Philip Glass's Einstein On the Beach, also Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting In A Room [everything to this point classic minimalism, everything after this postminimalist], also Larry Fast's Computer Music Experiments Vol. 1, also Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening, also Stephen Scott's Minerva's Web and The Tears Of Niobe, also Eliane Radigue's Kyema: Intermediate States, also Phil Niblock's Four Full Flutes, also Larry Polansky's Another You (17 Variations For Microtonal Harp), also Barry Truax's Riverrun and The Wings Of Nike.

Kyle may disagree about the exact classification of some of these pieces, in which case he's right and I'm wrong, since he knows tons more about contemporary music than I do. Haven't heard LaMonte Young's The Well Tuned Piano but from all reports it seems as though it belongs to the group of post-1960 pieces exhibiting radical time dilation (i.e., after listening to it, you think the piece was much shorter than it really was).

The composer Mike Winter has done a lot of work with proportional notation; he has created score generators that create scores from rules and data sets, for example, and some produce proportional notation. Check out his essay on automatic score generation here:

http://www.unboundedpress.org/

Seems odd that someone hasn't developed software that would make proportional notation easy and natural - it's not that big of a technical problem to turn space into time.