First look at Musescore 4 and short look at my very first composition

So, Musescore 4 ...

My first impressions are ... meh. It does not (yet!) come across as smooth and pristine as Musescore 3 looks to me right now. A bit clunkier, a bit slower; you can only have 1 tab open (opening a second score will start another window) for sound engine reasons, and there is some overhead introduced by having to download MuseSound seperately via MuseHub, which is a program that will then decide to run in the background without asking you, for absolutely no reason.

I haven't done much with it yet, just a very short piano piece. Testing the sound - well, the piano sample is good, I think; the articulation does not sound any more sophisticated to me than in the previous version, and it is currently quite buggy. For example, if I click on the first note, and then 'play', it will do a fade-in, because, I suppose, the engine is not ready to start yet but we cannot let the user wait. However, if I click on the key before the first bar instead, it starts properly... I also saw some inconsistency with the cursor and what I actually hear.

I was surprised to find support for sagittal notation symbols - with detailed description notes including stuff like "2°up [43EDO]". That is promising, but since the sound engine cannot do the actual tuning, it is an empty promise as of now. (I already knew I would continue using Musescore 3 for xenharmonic stuff.) I don't know how compatible the new MuseSound will be with tunings in the long run.

As I said, I have only tested 1 piano sound yet, so I can't really say much about MuseSound, but I don't tend to trust new things... when I imported a random piece for a quick test I immediately run into some notes not being played, because they are out of range - are they tho? I have too often seen soundfonts being very conservative about what an instrument can play, completely unnecessarily constricting itself to a short range. Instead of, you know, just adding all the sounds anyways and if they sound bad, then they sound bad. I can edit a .sf2 file, but I won't be able to edit anything more complex, so I'm a bit pessimistic about that.

(While I do want to try writing down a few pieces of instrumental music that was meant for real instruments, and see how it looks, I also want to write something purely digital and there I don't know why I should give a fuck about a flute not being able to play a really low note, if it sounds right.)

~

Anyway, what I did write down was my very first composition (that I know of):

At the time, I could read german pretty well, but had zero knowledge of english pronounciation, and just randomly picked words that look cool. :D But I had strong opinions about the correct pronounciation: "head" is actually pronounced "heyd". I don't know whether I already had a particular meaning in mind when I was five, but I remember that a few years later I had decided that "Headboard Milano" was the name of a particularly gruesome war on my fantasy world. :)

This piece was written by someone with really small hands, so there are no wider spreads than a fifth and a sixth. It is very strange to me now, having very little (but some) memory of improvising on the piano until I had a canonical piece.

(I am going to be relentlessly proud about having written this at age 5. Sue me.)

edit:

Aaah I just remembered one more fun fact: The piece was always about a war: "white keys versus black keys" which is what's going on in the middle section. That's why there are F# major and C major chords. :D

December 2022 update

 Okay well... I haven't used this blog in a while, have I?

The thing is, for almost everything I want to say, there usually is a better platform. My thougts about worldbuilding and all related creative thinking (which is more than half of what I do) go to a dedicated forum, where I am also a moderator and part of a community that feels like an extended family with some people I love and some odd relatives that I'd rather not be related to...

I have stopped using youtube, preferring to upload my music on bandcamp. Youtube is owned by Google, and it is also often quite terrible when it comes to performance, because obviously the main goal of such platforms is advertisement and data collection.

I still post on Facebook - which is even more terrible - because some people I can only contact there, so I am stuck a bit - and my small corner is surprisingly calm; I do not engage in debates that suck out my life from my body.^^

I have left twitter since that buffoon took over (you might have heard of it), not that it was ever healthy to be on this platform; it compares well to how people used to imagine Hell to be, with everyone constantly trying to bring out the worst in everyone else...

I do have a mastodon account since earlier this year, and I quite enjoy that one; it is calmer than other places, and I am on a server where I genuinely don't have to deal with nazis and/or terfs. Or "proud nationalists" and "gender critical feminists", as they try to conceal their genocidal intentions.

Anyway, the fediverse is nice, it has a lot of amazing art (seriously, check out mastodon.art), but it seems to be lacking when it comes to music. There is a contemporary-music-group, but the only posts seem to be links to commercial sites like applemusic or spotify and shit like that - is that really where serious composers post their music nowadays? o_0

You can find me at @jundurg@mastodon.lol, if I remember correctly. I do post my music when I upload a piece, and even though a tag like #xenharmonic gets used by basically no one, somebody has to start.

(This is another reason to be on facebook - it does have an active group for xenharmonic music, where I discovered quite a bit of interesting music. There also is a dedicated discord server, but it's too big by now and overwhelmingto me.)

Anyways, lots of words about the state of the internet - what about me?

I currently have less time than ever before, because I started an internship, which will end in January. So, I hope I will get to do more creative stuff again afterward. Amongst those things... I kind of have a HUGE backlog of piano pieces that are in danger of vanishing from this planet because there is no recording and I am starting to lose memory, because I haven't played some of them in years. If I try hard, I usually manage to recover them, but sometimes that fails and it's scary.

So one of the things I would like to do in 2023 is attempt to write some of these down, and focus on those that are important to me - I do not actually want to be upset about forgetting pieces that weren't that important. And for that, I kind of want to have a space to just self-indulgently talk about my music despite not posting any of it - huzzah, there is a need for this blog. ^^

The other music news thing is ... MuseScore 4 just came out, and I may or may not find it useful to make some actually listenable versions of instrumental music. It may very well end up being a disappointment, but I already made a few instrumentations of piano pieces this year in Musescore 3, and a few of them turned out nicely.

Because the xenharmonic plugin I'm using only works on Musescore 3, I will most likely use both versions in parallel - 3 for composing weird cool stuff, 4 for writing down old piano stuff and 12edo instrumental experimenting. I really hope I will be able to do that!

I was meaning to write blog posts about my xenharmonic music that I wrote since October 2021, but I never got around it, so ... you can find it here: https://xoiii.bandcamp.com/ Let me just tell you, unidentified reader, that I had a lot of fun writing these. And MAYBE I will get around to write about them too, but there was always something else to do (including writing the next piece, for example)

I am not sure whether I should blog in English or in German; my update posts used to be in German but I might switch to English mostly.

~ .&"=%/&=")% ~

That was it for the informational part. Casual readers may stop here, as I just want to lay out what my piano piece situation currently is, and that's probably not particularly interesting if you can't listen to them. :P

The Piano Suites

There are 9 of them in total - in theory, as the 8th is sort of half-unfinished and also doubles as an experimental sonata that I SORT OF intended to get back to at some point. Suites 1 through 5 are gradually more complex early works (it feels weird to call them early, but hey, 2006 is actually a long time ago now, what the heck.) Suite 6 is written shortly before I started composition at the university, and is probably my most radical piano piece (along with No.8); I should in theory have a score of it (because I did show it to a professor once) but I don't know if I still have it. It has one rhythm in it that I have not been able to transcribe at the time and I am not sure if it is even reasonable to try; I might by now have forgotten how I originally played this section in 2008 and so that might be irrelevant.

Suite No.7 is kind of more boring and conventional (except that I did a somewhat reasonable job at variations) and in theory, a score should exist, but I am also not sure where. Suite No.8 is ... idk what the heck it even is, it consists mostly of improvisational parts stuck together. I made a new recording at some point in the last years, to try to work on it again, and push it towards being an actual piece, but idk. Finally, Suite No.9 is a very conservative two-movement thingy that I only recently decided would be No.9 because those two pieces lacked a title and I was like "eh, sort of fits in there".

The Program Music

There is three of them, the first being from 2007 and actually really fun to play, which is why I kind of want to prioritize a bit; then another one from ... also 2007? Those two are following the plot of two absurd theatre pieces, one of which was only a sketch. And the third one is from 2008, and I actually published it at the time, so there is a recording somewhere. It is Bartókian and fun, but I am currently not particularly keen on working on it - I started several times and it turned out to be difficult to write down, and there isn't a high risk of losing this piece, so...

The Sort-Of Program Music ... or just any other pieces, I guess

Those are pieces that don't follow a plot line directly but they have sort of programmatic titles sometimes. Idk. I'm gonna translate them into english, bc why not:

- Castanian Suite: Two movements, VERY Bartókian, and I love them

- Utnapishtim Suite: Two movements (third movement never finished and got lost), title referencing the Gilgamesh Epos

- Three aggressive pieces: I forgot the first two! Which weren't that good, but still. The third one does deserve some attention tho.

- Deep Night Suite: That one sort of does not require attention, as I kind of remade it into a newer project, and there is at least a partial recording somewhere.

- Neverwhere Suite: Same as above; the old version from 2005 is not worth preserving as it got reworked later; the reworked version does need my attention tho, but it will be moved into a different kind of project.

- the very early stuff. My first composition is from 1995 (I was five!) and it not only has a place in my heart but it is actually on the same level as stuff I wrote when I was sixteen. What the heck. There are other early pieces, but they will not get prioritized I think.

- the three late-summer-pieces from 2005... sort of precursors to the Suites, and they do deserve some attention actually. Part of the second piece is lost, I think, but that was kind of intentional, as it was kind of bad.^^

- ... probably more stuff I can't be bothered to look up right now ...

Early Instrumental Music

I wrote a piece for french horn and piano in ~2007, and a piece for cello and piano in ~2008. There should be scores of them somewhere (except the unfinished last movement of the latter) but particularly the horn piece is actually one of my favourites of the time, and I want to have a shiny new version of it.

...

The ongoing stuff

Collections of piano pieces that don't count as finished because I intend to add more whenever I feel like it. First and foremost, the Gunnerkrigg Chords, which can be found on youtube (until I might move them somewhere) and which I might also try to orchestrate a bit. About half of the 50 pieces already got written down properly, I might want to export them from Sibelius to Musescore though because Sibelius has an abominable user interface that I would like to not inflict on myself ever again.

Then there is the Deep Night collection, most of which is also on youtube. These are close to my heart and mostly VERY short. I'd love to have actual scores of them, because I am not able to play them without sheets and the sketches I am using for playing are abysmal. I kind of have memorized where to jump from where to where, and which things to repeat, and oftentimes, half of the piece isn't even written down. In short, it is a mess that I would like to fix.

And finally, the Neverwhere collection, which might get renamed into Shallow Night or something, because I do not want to use a trademark owned by the BBC. These are old pieces reworked and I also intend to add newer stuff here.

Soooooo.....

What should I prioritize? Deep Night needs the attention, because of the horrible state of it's current sketches... but the Deep Night is the summer solstice, and it is winter. It would be hard to get into the right mindset right now.

So maybe some of the earlier pieces ... Castanian Suite perhaps, 3rd and 4th piano suite (both probably being exhausting to work with, because of their weird rhythms and improvisational effects that are hard to transcribe), and throw in the occasional easy piece ... like my very first composition for example. :D

ALSO needed ... um ... replacing the two strings that are missing from my piano for years now. Oops. (There is actually a reason for that, I promised myself that I would only replace them if I had earned money myself) I might run into difficulties because piano string makers want to know what type of string to replace, and I am pretty sure I have thrown at least one of them away, and ... honestly, I'm not sure if the other one has been stuck somewhere inside the piano for a year now. Might be the case. Anyway, I really desperately need to lowest E for just *two* particular pieces, dammit.

Now ... well, I'm gonna check out Musescore 4 over the holidays, and see whether it turns out to be a disappointment or it motivates me to write stuff.