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Topic: Musical theatre  (Read 1726 times) previous topic - next topic

Musical theatre

Are there any musical theatre writers using NWC? I am in the midst of developing a project. I searched the forum and some posts came up from 15 years ago!

Re: Musical theatre

Reply #1
While I haven't scored anything for musical theatre, I do play trombone in musical theatre a lot - about 35 productions in the last 10 years.

What I can say from what I've seen is that it doesn't seem to matter what scores are written with they are usually all equally awful...

Very rarely do I see a score that ALWAYS gives sufficient time for things like mute changes and page turns.  Many scores don't give ANY time for these things, except perhaps by accident.  This is, of course, the fault of the arranger/composer/transcriber more than the product used to write the score.

I HAVE written scores for concert bands (up to around 30 instruments) with no difficulty using NWC.  While my scores are not huge and I can usually get an entire part on 2 pages, there is plenty of scope with NWC to make page breaks where ever you need to in order to make page turns possible, so longer scores should pose no great difficulties.

As musical theatre scores are usually hired out as printed books, the file format is irrelevant unless you have a publisher with particular requirements, BUT given many scores I've seen have actually been HANDWRITTEN I doubt this is likely to be a problem.

Distribution as PDF files makes the file format of the notation software totally irrelevant AND it makes it harder for the recipient to stuff things up ;)
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.