Category: la petite girafe

A blog.

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la petite girafe Miscellaneous

Business Cards

La petite girafe et l’object:
Business Cards

What is higher than a giraffe, yet small enough to fit even into a composer’s wallet?

Let’s get down to … business cards. Everyone needs such items. Or perhaps it’s rather: everyone imagines them to be requisite. Some months ago—it might have been a year or more as well—I designed some new business cards and had them printed by an online print shop. Before that, I kept regularly running out of cards, for I used to cut them out of a thick cardboard by myself and print them at home respectively. That was fun to do on the one hand, but, as you might imagine, was not the most professional way of how to do it. Thus, I looked for a “large-scale” solution and ordered some 250 pieces or even more.

I would never again run out of business cards. Unless I moved from my current place.

We might consider that young people relocate every now and then. Given that events where business cards are being distributed occur just a few dozen times a year, we might furthermore assume that in one year I could get rid of approximately 30 cards. In practice, I happened to be more penurious this year, by far. Hence, there is a probability of moving away contra a probability of getting rid of all cards before the resettlement. As you might agree, we cannot say for sure what’s more likely to come true.

Moreover, I already feel a strong wish to redesign my business cards. That is, on the one hand, not astonishing as composers are likely to feel a desire to reshape and reframe and dig things over and over again. But this time it’s different. I have a clear image of how the new business card should look like: Quite similar to the old one, with a little giraffe on the back side.

Categories
la petite girafe Miscellaneous

Proofreading the Parts

Proofreading The Parts —
A story with the little giraffe

Writing a decent piece of music is the one thing. Let’s call it the exciting part of a composer’s work. Admittingly, reflecting—for hours and hours—on what kind of sound should come next isn’t always so exciting, though. However, once a piece of music is written it cannot be considered finished—at all.

Usually, the primary outcome of a composer’s work is a score. Of course it would be quite impracticable for the musicians to play from a full score, at least when we’re speaking about orchestra pieces or such music written for large ensembles. For that reason, the seperate parts are extracted from the score and need to be put into a pleasant layout in order that the musicians can read their parts most easily.

Finishing one part might take up to two hours, depending strongly on the length of a piece and the complexity of the graphics of the notation. When each part is done and looks nice, I always print the entire parts and continue working with the paper sheets. I observed that proofreading the parts only on a screen would lead me to overlooking too many mistakes, so I do this step of procedure in a rather old-fashioned way with a red pencil.

Now, let’s have a look at what the little giraffe can see on the picture. There’s a decrescendo-al-niente-line that’s colliding with the barline. This isn’t really looking so terribly beautiful and would perhaps bedevil the legibility of the part, so it needs to be patched. Furthermore, I marked a tempo text. As you can see, the A tempo is too close to the molto rall. and a musician could read A tempo rall. instead of playing the first bar A tempo and starting the molto rall. in the second one.

So, proofreading is somewhat important and one should carry out this work very carefully as it needs plenty of time and concentration.

In the end, there is one golden rule: The most annoying mistakes won’t reveal themselves, unless the final score is printed in high quality. (-;