E’en as the busy bee

Beginning to prepare (old pieces, but music which I still own up to) for an August flute convention. Because the pieces are old enough, that they pre-date my migration to Sibelius, it was at last necessary to install Finale 2004 onto my new machine.

 

(In recent weeks, I evaded the necessity of digging around for [a] the Finale install disc, and [b] the flash drives onto which I had off-loaded my Finale files, by re-constructing from scratch in Sibelius the Nunc dimittis from the Evening Service in D – will probably pursue the same method with the Magnificat – the Opus 34 Short Organ Pieces, and the Studies in Impermanence.  The last was easily the most work, and yet . . . but I get ahead of myself.)

 

Much of my flute (or with-flute) music is already either in the pipeline, or available at Lux Nova (Heedless Watermelon, The Angel Who Bears a Flaming Sword, e.g.)  The scores which I am keen to make press-ready for the present are:

 

Radiant Maples, Op. 59 (fl/cl/hp/pf)

Fragments of Morning Has Broken, Op. 64a (i.e., the second version: fl/cl/pf)

Starlings on the Rooftop, Op. 82 (fl/Eng hn/bn)

 

Back when I first switched from Finale to Sibelius (because I wanted an early sense of the process), I tried to export a score from Finale as an XML file, and then import the XML into Sibelius. It was an utter disaster.  Granted, I started bold, with the Overture to White Nights, but the result was such a horrific mess, I knew immediately that there was a case where I was going to be happier spending the time and labor in building a Sibelius file from scratch.

 

A few years passed since that inaugural attempt.  Alas, even with the smaller-scale scores under present advisement, the transfer method results in a godawful mess.

 

Am presently weighing whether I should use the Sibelius file which results from the import of XML as sort of a "junk car" from which to salvage some materials brought into a fresh Sibelius file.

 

The adventure from last night, though, has confirmed for me the prudence of just starting afresh with the Studies in Impermanence in Sibelius.  And it is informing the Grand Matter in the back of my musical mind, which is how both to bring what is already composed of White Nights forward, and how to proceed with completion of the remaining scenes.