Or at least they should be. Over the long weekend I spent quite a bit of time working on Finale files for a new publication project. An element of this editing is layout and making sure the music has no bad page turns and reads easily.
First, please do not comment that I should use Sibelius instead of Finale. They are both fine programs capable of making very clean music notation for publication. The arguments for or against each seem to me about as pointless as the Mac/PC debate. I got started in Finale and will stick with it. But I digress.
Publishers should be correcting the page turns before they get to you
The main point I would make is there is no reason to have a bad page turn in any music. If there are bad page turns they should have been fixed in editing. The editing to do so is really simple, too.
If you buy music that has bad page turns that basically just screams that the music was not notated well, that not enough effort went into editing. Cheap edition/bad edition/etc.
We have all seen the horrible Finale/Sibelius parts that show up on our stands periodically. Bad page turns really should be a thing of the past, and in my publications I make every effort to avoid them. If you see bad page turns in a publication by all means complain, as all it would have taken to fix them was a little more care and time taken in editing the notation.
To give readers the scoop what I am working on, my weekend editing was on a collection of low horn etudes. More on those another day.
