I spent the morning attempting to discover a way to make Finale do a very simple thing: using the ScoreMerger option in the program, take the soloists/chorus/piano staves and append them to an orchestral template.  In other words, take the music I’ve already written and copy it over to a file with all those extra instruments in it.

It would not.  It would append, but then it also copied over the page setup, so that I’d have two pages of 11×17 orchestral score followed by x number of 8-1/2×11 pages of piano score, along with all the title page stuff of the piano score.

I could go in and tell it to forget all page formatting, but then the 11 staves of the piano score would end up in weird places: the sopranos above the soloists, or the piano staves distributed amongst the vocals.

And under no circumstances was it bringing over dynamics or tempos.

Blergh.

I posted on the Finale online forum, but so far no one’s answered, except one person who has had the same issues.  Their solution was the same as mine: re-order the orchestral score so that the piano part is below the vocals (normally it’s above them), then copy and paste the piano staves into the orchestral score.  Not difficult but hardly elegant.

That took all morning, so no actual orchestration got done.  But the template is set up now, and I should be accomplishing something tomorrow.

And I finally got that little wall on the back end of the patio done:

When autumn ferns come back on the market, I’ll plant one there.

Soon, but not tomorrow, I will revisit the stone store and drag home some medium-thickness flagstone for the gate entrance, and for the area around the firepit.