Sibelius explains its slurs

Daniel Spread­bury of Sibelius


In the pitched bat­tle between Sibelius and Finale, one con­stant crit­i­cism has been that Sibelius sac­ri­fices con­trol and power¬†in an effort to make mat­ters sim­ple for the end user. Advo­cates of Finale always claim a supe­rior abil­ity to fine-tune nota­tion layout.

That this is so — or has been so — is pretty much admit­ted in a remark­ably hon­est blog post­ing by Daniel Spread­bury, ¬†who hap­pens to be the Senior Project Man­ager at Sibelius. As I come to Sibelius from Finale, my own par­tic­u­lar com­plaint has always been about slurs. About slurs Mr. Spread­bury writes:

…it turns out that some­times you sim­ply need the full con­trol afforded by all of the cubic B√©zier‚Äôs con­trol points, so the first thing we set out to do in Sibelius 6 is pro­vide access to all of those con­trol points. Slurs now show six han­dles, all of which can be manip­u­lated with either the mouse or the key­board, and numer­i­cally using the Prop­er­ties win­dow. Fur­ther­more, we made it pos­si­ble to adjust the posi­tions of each of these con­trol points sep­a­rately for slurs that cross a sys­tem or page break.

Finale users will rec­og­nize what this means — Sibelius now han­dles slurs much as Finale does.

Mr. Spread­bury addresses other fac­tors in the devel­op­ment of Sibelius 6 as well in his blog post on “The Story Behind Sibelius 6.” For me, Sibelius 6 now rep­re­sents the ideal bal­ance between sim­plic­ity and pow­er­ful com­po­si­tion nota­tion. It’s hard to imag­ine that Finale is capa­ble of doing some­thing that Sibelius can not — and Sibelius han­dles mat­ters much more intu­itively. I highly rec­om­mend this software.

It’s inter­est­ing, too, that Sibelius is will­ing to address its soft­ware chal­lenges in a pub­lic venue such as this. Be sure to read the entire blog entry here.

About Richard D. Russell

This was written by Richard D. Russell, New York City based composer of fine music.