Bowings are a type of symbol used in music notation to indicate the use of the bow in string parts, which indicate the manner in which a note should be played. Finale and Sibelius share a standard way to create these; they treat bowings as articulations, which are automatically positioned in proximity to the notehead.
KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS & PLAYBACK
In Sibelius, you can add alternate key shortcuts to the Default bowing shortcuts. Locate “Keypad (Articulations)” in Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts (called “Menus and Shortcuts” in Sibelius 6). Select Upbow or Downbow from the list, then click the Add button at the right to add an alternate keystroke.
In Finale, you can program a new key shortcut for Upbow or Downbow by selecting the Articulation tool, then typing SHIFT followed by the letter or number you want to use. When the dialog opens, select the articulation you want to assign to your keystroke.
Both programs are pretty smart about playback, and with a decent sound set, you’ll hear a difference between upbow and downbow during playback (the little GM soundset does not have multiple samples or velocity sensitivity for playback.)
ARTICULATIONS
In engraved music for publication, articulations such as staccato, accent-staccato, accent, tenuto, marcatissimo etc., are actually considered to be part of the notehead, and so they appear that way – automatically moving inside the staff to maintain close proximity to the notehead regardless of pitch or stem direction:
By default, Finale and Sibelius both apply the upbow and downbow symbol as a note – attached articulation, centered over the note, and above the staff.
STAGGERED BOWING
Bowings, though, are a special case. First, as mentioned above, rather than becoming “part of the notehead”, bowing marks always go above the note (except in special divisi situations), and outside of the staff, rather than orbiting the notehead inside the staff like a staccato or accent might.
Additionally, while they appear in proximity to the notehead a high percentage of time, sometimes a single note or phrase needs to be sustained longer than is possible with a single bow. In this case, it is common practice to divorce the bowing symbol from any notehead, and display it independently. The term for this is “Staggered Bowing”. The location of the symbol relative to the barline gives a beat location for the bow change, independent of any specific notehead.
In the following example, note how the first three bowings appear centered over specific notes, but the last one appears to be in the middle of a bar, “staggered”, e.g. not attached to any notehead:
“Free Bowing” is another related technique used by composers. This is a directive which specifies that bowing need not be uniform within the section. This is sometimes indicated with parenthesized bow markings, or with a text directive.
For these cases, it’s not advisable to try to use the standard bowing articulations provided by the notation software. In Sibelius, you’ll find you can’t move the Upbow or Downbow symbols left or right, and if you try to do this in Finale, you can wreak havoc with your note spacing.
Fortunately, both Finale and Sibelius have alternative ways to enter these bowing symbols which are not note attached.
In Finale, Go into the Expression Selection dialog, select Technique Text and then “Create Technique Text”. Choose “Music Font” from the popup menu (which will most likely be Maestro in a standard Finale Default File). Now, up in the main Text Menu, choose “Inserts > Symbol”. Select the Upbow and Downbow symbols from the list. (slots 178 and 179). In the Positioning Tab, set the horizontal positioning to be at “Horizontal Click Position” to allow you freedom to move it anywhere in the bar. Or, cut to the chase and download this file, which has these premade (including the parenthesized variant).
Finale users should also consider using this text expression technique for creating caesurae (breath marks). Dragging a note-attached breath mark articulation to move it can mess up note spacing in the parts.
In Sibelius, all of the Symbols available in the Keypad are also available in the Symbols dialog. The symbols in the dialog don’t have any unique placement attributes associated with them, so you can place them anywhere. Type “Z” to open the Symbols dialog (or “Gallery”, as it is now called in Sibelius 7) and choose your bowing from the list. Once chosen, the cursor will turn blue to indicate that it is “loaded”. Click above the staff where you would like the bowing to appear.
The only thing to be aware of when using these free-floating symbols is that you may find that locations can shift a bit between score and parts in both programs, so you may have to make some minor adjustments. All in all, though, this is a simple, clean way to enter staggered (e.g. horizontally offset) bowings in Finale and Sibelius, which both consider articulations, including bowing marks, to be “note attached”.
~robert
for Laura Cones
Postscript: It’s worth noting that not many standard classical published works available for rental have typeset bowings. When an orchestra rents a piece for performance, advance parts are given to the principal string players to mark their preferred bowings in pencil. These are then given to the music librarian, who pencils these bow markings into each part for the ensemble in advance of rehearsals.
Nice post. Its good to see other people using the Expression tool to put in “Free Bowing” and breath marks. I know most of the scores I see never place them that way and I usually have to remove and reapply correctly. Using the articulation tool for this purpose is just extra work when going to parts. -Cheers!
Your remark about moving an articulation horizontally in Finale is misleading. It will wreak havoc in note spacing only if you have ‘Space for Articulations’ selected. Many users, including myself, rarely use this (except perhaps for rolled chords in keyboard music or breathing marks in vocal music) and so moving an articulation horizontally has no ill effects at all.
Thanks for your comment. Yes, it is true; many advanced users will turn the “articulations” spacing parameter off and on at will in Finale. However…
Ideally, you want to create bowings and other articulations in both Finale and Sibelius in such a way that there are no possible repercussions later in the process, whether you are working by yourself, or in a production environment.
For instance, let’s say as a composer, you hire a copyist to prepare your parts. When you hand off your score to have the parts prepared, the person preparing the parts may be an advanced user, with the same spacing settings as you. However, at the rehearsal, you note that some Violin bowings you put into the score have gone missing in the prepared part.
Why? In the score, they were dragged to the right into the next bar to indicate a bowing change there. Everything looks correct in the score. However, the distance the articulation is from the notehead remains constant between score and part, so in the part, the the bowing is no longer related to the middle of the next bar; in fact, it’s outside of the page margins, easy to miss. Furthermore, if you *do* choose the alternative “Avoid Collision of: Articulations” spacing option, the bar with a whole note will expand to the width of the distance between the articulation and the note to which it is attached, usually three or four times wider than it should be until you manually move the articulation closer to the notehead and respace. Substituting a text expression / symbol as described in the tutorial requires less editing after the fact, and does not introduce possible errors caused by unexpected location.
The ability to factor articulations into spacing in Finale is not necessarily a bad thing, either. Typically, any articulation which is designed to align to the left or right of the notehead, rather than above or below it are candidates for this feature. Both Finale and Sibelius automatically allow extra space for rolled chords, for instance. Another example are the falls, scoops and doits used in jazz charts. In Finale, “Avoid Collision of: Articulations” must be on for these to be factored into the spacing.
“Railroad tracks” – a grand caesura, is another great candidate for a Symbol in Sibelius or a Text Expression in Finale.
The bottom line is, if it is possible to automate something so that it requires less manual tweaking, while at the same time introducing less margin for error, it’s worth taking advantage of. That is to say, although Finale (still) allows you to manually move a bowing left or right relative to the notehead, the available text expression option is actually be more efficient in current versions of the program, IMO.
~robert
Chances are that if it’s a single string part like this one, you haven’t used all four available voices. To avoid any issues with dynamic hairpins and such floating off with a mind of their own once I’ve extracted parts, I put in rests in an unused voice, hide them, and attach the dynamics there. I understand that this might not work well for playback, but for printing it works fine. Would that work for this as well?
Thanks, Justin.
I’ll assume we’re talking about Finale? (In Sibelius, it is not possible to add bowing marks from the keypad to rests). Yes, absolutely, your technique will work. You *can* create a specific beat in another voice and attach it as an articulation; in fact, a variation of this technique was used to create chord symbols for many years until the chord tool was updated to allow attachment to the beat rather than a note or rest. There is an advantage to your method in that you can control very exactly which beat the bowing appears.
However, in my opinion, it’s extra work for the same net effect : for this to work, you are entering one or more note or rest events, hiding them, possibly manually editing tie direction, then entering the bowing.
Regarding the ability to specify an exact horizontal location using your method: It would be nice if the Finale Expression Designer had a snap to beat setting (e.g. alignment point = beat 3), for fast exact beat placement, but of course, you can just shift double click on the expression to open the Expression Assignment dialog, and set this manually.
~robert