The solution, it turns out, is a very nifty iPhone app that can be had for $3.99.  NumPad is a multi-purpose number pad that connects to your computer via the iPhone’s WiFi connection.  It can be set to work as a standard number pad with, you know, numbers, or as seen here it can be set to control Sibelius.  You can get to the various toolbox thingies (or whatever they’re called) by swiping left or right).

I find that it’s very fast and responsive when my WiFi connection is functioning properly, but I imagine performance will vary according to your setting.  In any case, I was thrilled to find this solution, and thought I’d pass it along to readers and future Googlers.

Oh, and guess what: It’s similarly compatible with Finale.

Recently, while fishing through folders on my computer looking at old “sketches” and unfinished things, I found a folder that said “string quartet”. I had no recollection of ever having worked on a string quartet since college. Inside the folder were two files “mvt1″ and “mvt4″, dated September 2003. The one called “mvt4″ was immediately recognized as something that ended up becoming a sketch for Shakespeare’s Merchant.

When I opened “mvt1″, I had absolutely no recollection of composing it, nor was I convinced that it was even mine. (It seemed better than anything I could come up with.) After some time pounding my brain, trying to imagine how anyone else’s unfinished material could end up on my computer (was it a student? a poltergeist?), I eventually became satisfied that it was mine.

How embarrassing it would be to take this material and develop it, only to discover later that it was created by someone else. Since starting to use Sibelius about six years ago, I almost never sketch on paper anymore. If these sketches were on paper, I would have immediately recognized my own handwriting, and there would have been no dilemma.

If you’re upgrading to Leopard and still using Sibelius 4, you’ll need to get a compatibility patch from Sibelius. Unless, that is, you don’t need to be able to, uh, open and save files.

If you’re upgrading to Leopard and using Sibelius 5, and prefer not to have it crash upon startup, you’ll need this compatibility patch. Also, Sibelius has a suggestion for you if you’re experiencing screen redraw weirdness.

If you encounter strange screen redrawing behaviour during mouse input on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, e.g. when moving the shadow note over the staff, choose Sibelius > Preferences, go to the Textures page, and switch on Alternative texture drawing.

But the big one, that’s making me think twice about rushing to get Sibelius 5, is that none of the Sibelius Sounds installers work. More on that here.

I’m confident that Sibelius will sort all of these things out very quickly, though. They’re good.

Meanwhile, I’d been revising Letter To Hungary for its upcoming second performance, and the parts are just about due. I’ve been forced to work at my desk, where I do have Sibelius, but it’s not hooked up to any playback gear.

Yes, over the past four years or so, I’ve become spoiled by Sibelius playback. Fortunately, it’s mostly about tweaking dynamic markings and orchestration, so there’s really no need to play anything back, but today I did grapple with one very important passage that needed some relatively elaborate reworking. It was a struggle, but I got it done.

I’m not sure how I feel about this phenomenon with Sibelius. I was never one of those geniuses who writes everything in his head, but I did use to be able to accomplish a lot without being able to play back what I was writing. You know… back when it was pencil and paper. In cases where I needed to hear how harmonies progressed, I would plonk it out on the piano. But here’s the thing: I’m not a good pianist, and I rarely write for piano. Sibelius playback has saved me countless hours trying to work out composition problems by playing back exactly what’s on the page instead of the best my fingers can accomplish.

If my inner hearing has suffered, other aspects of composing have improved. Writing for strings, for example, was enhanced I think because Sibelius lets me think orchestrally. Also, I work much more quickly now than ever. I’ve learned to get my ideas down without agonizing over whether they’ll work. I play back frequently and do trial and error and triage until the problems are solved.

As for my revisions, I’m mostly satisfied. I had shown the piece to my former teacher (thanks, C.S.!), who had some wonderful suggestions. One in particular I simply can’t pull off under the current circumstances, which I regret.

After this, I’m just holding off on composing until I get my room back. I guess I’ll catch up on paperwork

As for new products that may result, the idea of some future hybrid of Sibelius’ current notation software and Pro Tools is tantalizing. I already use Sibelius for everything. (When I tell this to people in film scoring circles, they look at me like something’s hanging out of my nose.) It would be handy to be able to incorporate synchronized audio, for example, into a piece notated in Sibelius without having to dump it into another audio/MIDI sequencing program.

I love Sibelius to pieces, so I’m looking forward to seeing what new products, if any, emerge from this new relationship with Digidesign.

So, as of yesterday, Letter To Hungary is now out the door, delivered electronically to a printing store in Budapest. (See, I keep telling people: the internet is good for some things.)

Turns out, generating parts using Sibelius 4 has not been the Hamptons clambake I’d anticipated based on the hype. (Don’t get me wrong; I loooove Sibelius.) Also, the piece is so busy that for the first time ever, I’ve had to deliver a set of parts without a solution for every pageturn problem. I’m not an orchestral player or a professional copyist, so I simply couldn’t figure out how to get it done. Tips and tricks are welcome here.

Here’s a first pass at some brief program notes. I’m not sure it says what I need it to say. It’s hard to step back from it after three months wading in it waist high. Comments?

Since even before living in Budapest in the early 1990�s, I have loved Hungarian music for its enigmatic melodies and infectious rhythms. With Letter to Hungary I’ve taken the opportunity to explore what can be achieved by mixing these elements with my own style and sensibilities. This is a playful piece, in which Hungarian rhythms and instrumental styles appear unexpectedly and then recede into the background. Although most of the material is original, my hope is that the Hungarian listener will be convinced he or she has heard these tunes before.

The emotional core of this 15-minute piece is the well-known folksong Mad�rka, mad�rka, in which a little bird is asked to deliver a letter home to the singer’s beloved Hungary. To me, this suggests someone in exile, living outside Hungary against his/her will, and so it’s a song about homesickness. Fragments of the tune are woven into the texture of the plaintive, chorale-like introduction, and it becomes the main focus of the slow middle section. The final minutes consist of a vigorous scherzo that eventually becomes a gentle backdrop for one last majestic statement of the mad�rka theme, culminating in a wild cs�rd�s coda.

Sketching without paper certainly takes some getting used to, but it’s worth it, given the amount of time saved. In Sibelius, I typically start with just a few staves and just sketch away. One nice thing is that you can decide what certain milestones in the piece will be, and put them in all at once, knowing that you can always insert as many bars as needed in between them. It helps the process knowing that here’s x material, and here’s y material, and I can just add measures as needed to make a transition.

If you’re writing for a film, or you’re concerned with timing for other reasons, it’s also handy to show the time code in your sketch, putting in empty measures between sections that are finished to make sure the timing is right.

When it’s time to flesh it out, I may just start adding instruments, and copying material from the sketch staves into their appropriate instrumental lines, or if it’s a larger ensemble, I may copy from the sketch into the real score in a different document. Sibelius makes copying and pasting very easy with its filters feature. For example, if you want to only copy the bottom note from a line consisting of block chords, you can do that.

In the former scenario, where you just build the sketch into the final work, the sad side effect is that there is no history of the creation of the piece unless you’re very disciplined about saving backups at various stages. I’m not very disciplined. I would like to see a future version of Sibelius incorporate some kind of version control system that stores the whole history of a file, and even lets you roll back to an earlier version if desired.

I’m glad I’m just old enough to have been trained in a world where handwriting on paper was the only option. I hope younger composers will continue to receive that training. But, not having to deal with paper makes composing much easier and more fun. I dare say that I would not have been able to accept my current project — 3 months to do a 15-minute piece — if it weren’t for Sibelius.