Making Music: From ideas to prints to performance

Musical arrangements are written for our orchestra by our conductor, Michael Copley. To print the music, volunteers from the orchestra run a complete in-house desktop publishing and printing system. Once the music is written with the software Sibelius,  scripts, written in Sibelius' own programming language ManuScript, are used to batch-process the files. The files are printed and uploaded to the orchestra website.

Having this in-house music-writing and printing setup opens up many musical possibilities for the players. It means that novice players who need specially adjusted music in order to learn faster, can have the music specially arranged for them. Conversely, those who wish to dive straight in and try their hand at musical composition can very quickly have a full orchestral piece, of the own composition, being played by our full orchestra.

If you would like to know more about the automation steps in our printing setup, please write to Jennifer Deegan, who has set up the system, via our orchestra contact address. We are also very happy to have new members join us, and to learn about ManuScript programming, as well as orchestral playing and composition.