This post is part of a series that aims to shine a light on projects in which Dorico has played a part. If you have used Dorico for something interesting and would like to be featured in this series, please let me know. The performance materials for humanoid , prepared by music engraver Hugo Bouma and published by Boosey and Hawkes in Berlin, were all made with Dorico, and I caught up with Hugo to find out more about this project.
Leonard Evers is a fast-rising composer whose first opera for children, Gold! His music is infused with the influences of jazz, world music, and contemporary music, and he prides himself on working collaboratively with theatre and opera directors, librettists, and performers. These influences all come together in his latest work, which will be coming to the stage in just a few weeks in Winterthur and Bern.
I talked to Hugo about his involvement in the project. HB: I know Leonard Evers from playing in an orchestra that he conducted called the Ricciotti Ensemble , for which I have also made quite a few arrangements over the years. In fact, only last month was his farewell tour as a conductor — we went to Cuba!
Somewhere in October he asked me to assist him with this opera: the premiere and publishing deadlines were all set and coming up fast, and he was still frantically composing the whole thing. Initially I only had to make the piano reduction, which meant that every bit he finished got sent directly to me to work on. When we came back from Cuba it was agreed that I would also prepare the rest of the material, and in the process help him with editing as well.
How long were you working on this project? DS: You chose to typeset the materials in Dorico — did you have to convert them from another format? HB: Leonard works in Sibelius and sent me. I chose however to just export a PDF from them, with my old copy from the pre-Dorico days, and make a clean transcription from that, as my experiments with MusicXML import turned out to be just as much work cleaning up. This also forced me to, in a sense, proof-read every line, and I caught a lot of mistakes that way, while also guaranteeing clean input.
