This is what Matanya Ophee who provided the original transcription at www.orphee.com -which seems frequently inaccessible- had to say: Move over Spanish Romance, Jeux Interdix or whatever you want to call yourself. This Elegy is the ultimate, unequivocal and final replacement to a piece of seductive guitar music which overstayed its welcome a couple of generations ago. Enough is enough and now it is time for a fresh candidate. Soulful, melancholy, with just the right touch of sentimental debauchery and fairly easy to play. It is Russian in origin and I found it while searching for material for the next volume of the Russian Collection, now in its final stages of preparation. Many Russian guitarists now play this piece. I am particularly indebted to young Vladimir Markushevich, an up and coming virtuoso of the seven-string guitar, for acquainting me with it. It is a good question if the composer is indeed the early nineteenth century master Mikhail Vyssotsky. Volume VII of the Russian Collection includes several pieces by him. I have in my private collection the majority of his known works, and quite a few which are not well-known. This was not his style. In all probability, the composer was someone who worked in the tradition of popular music current in the Soviet Union in the years of the Second World War. It more fits the temperament of people like Soloviov- Sedoi, Dunaevsky, Mokrousov and others of their ilk. If only I knew this piece way back then, when lollipops like this were the mainstay of my youthful follies. As they say in Russian: ENDZHOITE! ===== This is the text of my Usenet posting in a thread about the transcriptions with six notation programs (Encore, Finale, Music Press, Overture, Score, Sibelius): Newsgroups: rec.music.classical.guitar,rec.music.compose,rec.music.theory Subject: Re: Six Music Notation Programs - engraving comparison Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2005 20:08:56 +1000 Message-ID: <45q6e1p065k2maju90nivto5mhc29fhcoi@4ax.com> Lines: 103 On Sat, 23 Jul 2005 03:44:33 GMT, whitcopress@earthkink.net (Richard White) wrote in rec.music.theory: >In article , "Matthew Fields" > wrote: > >> In article , >> John Rethorst wrote: >> >In article >> >, >> > whitcopress@earthkink.net (Richard White) wrote: >> > >> >> . . . by design. IIRC, the main criterion for the enterprise called for >> >> emulations to come as close as possible to the typeset score presented. >> >> Cloning was the order of the day. >> > >> >For the first three done, anyway: Score, Music Press and Encore. The Finale, >> >Overture and Sibelius were simply done as examples of scoring in those >programs. >> > >> >> Well, they sure came out close enough as clones that this particular >> output batch wouldn't sway me in any particular direction. > >. . . nothing like success :-) There are some subtle differences, though. Take yours, Richard: why are all dotted crotchet rests in the middle strand of the Music Press score written as crotchet + quaver? No other score of the six does that. The Music Press score is also the only one without bar numbers and the length of the note stems in the outer strands seems too short. The fundamental flaw in the use of accidentals in bar 3 has already been mentioned, and I'm glad to say the my favourite program did by default insert the natural in front of the d"; I'm also wondering about the need for the courtesy accidental in the same bar for the f#" - I can't see any natural f which would require it. The following remarks are my personal observations and I precede them with a big "IMHO". A major difference between the six presented scores is the inconsistent placement of rest symbols in the middle strand. Within one bar, I think they should be at the same horizontal level as much as possible (see the quaver rests in bars 8 and 14 of the Score and Encore scores which are at different heights, whereas they are at the same height in Music Press and Overture). The position of the quaver rests in bar 10 and 30 of the Sibelius piece is puzzling. The repeat instruction in Finale (D.S. al Coda) is wrong. Finale also omits a courtesy natural in bar 7 (a'). The Overture score is the only one which doesn't have the final chord arpeggiated and which doesn't have a double bar line between bars 30 and 31 (at the DC/Coda). The original's repeat instruction "D.C. al segno et poi la Coda" is neither Italian nor conforms to standard musical convention. The standard, as I understand it, is "D.C. al coda/Coda" where the coda is denoted with a crossed upright oval, and the redirection with "al Coda". See also < http://www.mpa.org/notation/notation.pdf> - thank you, John, for that link. All the transcriptions forget that the guitar is a transposing instrument: it sounds an octave lower than the written pitch and that should be indicated by an 8 under the treble clef. While that could possibly be omitted because it can be considered as self evident to the intended audience, any resulting MIDI files from these transcriptions should be accordingly adjusted. I'm quite surprised that Matanya Ophee's own MIDI file does not. BTW, his web site (www.orphee.com) seems to be frequently inaccessible. I also think that a good case could be made for omitting the repeats when playing the da capo, especially for the first section (bars 1-8). The output of my preferred notation program, MOZART, is available on my web site. It took me about 30 minutes to prepare. The size of the PDF file is only 32KB. (The PDF file of the six examples is so big (972KB) because their musical elements are all, except Overture's, stored as graphical elements rather than glyphs of a font.) While MOZART's output is generally comparable to the six examples, it shows two major deficiencies: the height of 1st/2nd endings indicators can not be adjusted - they run through the high notes in the second repeat, and the 2nd ending indicator ends wrongly with a short vertical line. Secondly, it can only arpeggiate chords within a strand. As the arpeggios in this piece are applied to chords formed from the top and the middle strand, I had to cheat and duplicate notes in the other strand. The imperfections for both these features, especially the lack of adjustability for 1st/2nd ending indicators, make MOZART probably unsuited for professional engraving. On the other hand, compared to the prices quoted here earlier for the six programs (US$290 - US$750), MOZART's price of US$120, combined with what I consider the best note entry and editing mechanism from a computer keyboard, make it still a worthy player in this field. The daily contributions of its author, David Webber, to the MOZART discussion group where he and others provide friendly support and occasional off-topic morsels make for a happy group of users. -- Michael Bednarek http://mbednarek.com/ "POST NO BILLS" ===== Since then, and much to my embarrassment, David Webber pointed out to me that MOZART can indeed adjust the height of 1st/2nd endings, and I have found myself that the downstroke at the end of a second ending can be turned off. This is a major discovery for me, especially in the context of the above article, as I will now consider the MOZART score equal to the output of the others. There are of course a number of other features that MOZART can't (yet) do, mainly the inability to vary staff labels between 1st and following lines, and the shortcomings to arpeggiate chords across strands doesn't worry me too much. Michael Bednarek, Brisbane, 27-Jul-2005