Monthly Archives: May 2018

Working with Finale and Open Office

This entry was posted in Editing Writing and tagged Finale music OpenOffice on by

A current project of mine is compiling and editing the songbook portion of the ConCertino 2018 program book. I’m using OpenOffice for the pages and Finale for the music notation.

This is the first time I’ve worked with the full version of Finale on a project. Previously I’d used the budget versions, called Finale Allegro and later Finale PrintMusic. When the publisher dropped PrintMusic and offered a cheap upgrade to Finale, I took them up on it. I didn’t think that the extra features would be that useful for my purposes, but they’ve turned out to be quite helpful.
(more…)

The right word 4

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged usage vocabulary on by

Of all the crimes against good writing, the worst is using the wrong word. A grammatical error looks sloppy, but as long as it doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence, people will get what you mean. Use the wrong word, though, and you fail to convey what you’re trying to say. That amounts to failing as a writer.

Usage errors fall into several categories. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it includes the types of errors that annoy me the most.
(more…)

W. A. Mozart, ghostwriter

This entry was posted in Writing on by

A stranger approached Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in July 1791. He wanted Mozart to write a Requiem for a patron and to finish it as quickly as possible. Mozart never finished it. On December 5, he died. Some people think he was poisoned.

The patron was named Count Franz von Walsegg. The Count wanted to pass off Mozart’s work as his own, in memory of his recently deceased wife. In other words, he hired one of the greatest composers in history as a ghostwriter of music. Mozart’s students, Franz Xaver Süssmayr and Joseph Eybler, finished the work. Walsegg made a partial payment to Mozart; it isn’t clear whether he paid for the completion. The condition of secrecy had been thoroughly ruined by that point. German Mozart postal commemorative
(more…)