Cooking Poor:White sauce, creamed vegetables

The French refer to White Sauce, which I wrote about here, as a “mother sauce” because it provides the foundation for a host of variations. If you’re living poor, it’s a miracle for stretching food that costs only pennies. Your grandmother knew it. If you’re lucky, your mom knew it, too.

These days, white sauce isn’t something home cooks whip up regularly for weekday meals. More’s the pity. So-called creamed dishes—meats, leftovers, and particularly vegetables added to a basic white sauce—make great comfort food. They can be served as a side, or as a main dish spooned over rice or slices of toast. Excellent “living poor” food that makes your leftovers and vegetables go twice as far.

Unadulterated white sauce has a particular affinity for cooked vegetables, which reveal unexpected flavours when the two come together. Root vegetables like carrots or turnips become less aggressive and develop a pleasant sweetness. Scalloped potatoes (sliced potatoes and onions baked in white sauce) are their own brand of delicious. Equally good, if less fancy, are cubed, cooked potatoes added directly to the sauce—useful to know when you’re down to just a few shrivelling spuds. Green and yellow vegetables like peas, beans, celery, corn, and squashes undergo subtle transformations that reveal new sides to their character. Spinach and chard loose any residual bitterness and turn comfortingly rich. Anything in the cabbage family can be creamed, including broccoli, as can boiled white or yellow onions.

All that’s required for creamed vegetables is a quantity of white sauce and a quantity of cooked vegetables. The basic recipe for white sauce gives one cup, but it can be doubled endlessly. The vegetables should be cubed or sliced, not too thinly, and cooked simply by steaming or boiling. Combine the two in the pot you use to make the sauce and keep warm over low heat so the mixture doesn’t boil.

It often happens that when you add the vegetables, the sauce becomes a little too thick. Thin it with small amounts of milk, which can be cold, to bring it to the desired consistency.

A favourite creamed dish of mine is cabbage. Cabbages are a vegetable of choice when you’re living poor, at least here in Canada, because they’re inexpensive, filling, and nutritious. What’s more, they grow everywhere, ship easily, require minimal refrigeration, and keep for ages—qualities we should look for in our supermarket produce in order to slow the destruction of planet Earth. Reducing the harm done when money exchanges hands is one of the guiding principles of living poor.

Here’s my gussied-up version of creamed cabbage, the one I use when serving guests.

Creamed Cabbage

4 tbsp butter
4 tbsp flour
1-3/4 cups hot milk
1/2 tsp salt
freshly cracked pepper
nutmeg
1 small or 1/2 large head cabbage
buttered breadcrumbs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Shred cabbage, place in a large, heavy-bottomed pot, add a little water, and steam, covered, for 20 minutes. Drain and transfer to a casserole.

Make a white sauce of the butter, flour, milk, salt, and pepper. Season well with freshly grated nutmeg. Pour over the cabbage, cover with buttered breadcrumbs, and bake until bubbly and golden brown.

Next: White Sauce variations

Cooking Poor:Basic White Sauce

It has been said that one of the most subversive things you can do these days is grow your own food. Supermarket chains, and the food processing and shipping conglomerates that support them, don’t want you raising your own crops. They can’t make money from it. Heaven forfend consumers should also be producers. With a small plot of land—say, the size of a suburban backyard—your beets, potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, tomatoes, beans, squashes, and herbs cost virtually nothing but the time devoted to their cultivation. A kitchen garden deprives global food corporations of the only crop they harvest: money.

Living poor, especially in the city, you probably don’t own a patch of arable land despite being a person far more likely to cultivate it than the urban landowners who do. The kitchen garden “movement” is a great conscience-easer for the middle-class and wealthier, but is meaningless and insulting to the poor.

A more attainable way to give the finger to greed is to learn to cook your own food from scratch. Not the “seared Kobe beef with pancetta lardons and tarragon-balsamic vinegar reduction” cooking worshipped by pretentious urban foodies, but real home cooking, whose foundation is economy.

As with most of what used to be called the domestic arts, basic cooking skills are viewed as optional by many foodie dabblers. They either mistake expensive ingredients and exotic products for solid technique, or protest that learning somehow interferes with creativity, or are simply undisciplined frauds wearing the borrowed colours of a professional chef.

I’m alarmed at times by the number of people I know who don’t know how to mash potatoes, cook rice, steam vegetables, roast fowl, make stock, and a host of other fundamental kitchen skills. Without those skills, you wind up paying to have someone else prepare your food, either by purchasing processed approximations of the real thing or by supporting the hugely wasteful restaurant industry.

I’ve been preparing my own food and feeding households on a limited budget for years. I’ve already written a few food-themed articles in this blog, and am now beginning to realize I should incorporate more. Living poor and eating well is something I’ve spend decades practising. The time has come to share the fruits of my experience.

Good, practical cooking is largely a question of creating variety out of a small number of staples combined with fresh, unprocessed ingredients. One of the essentials to achieving this is knowing how to make White Sauce.

Foodies balk whenever I say White Sauce, preferring the la-dee-dah term, béchamel, unless, of course, they’re so far misguided by snobbery that their noses crinkle at the very thought of pre-nouvelle cuisine. They’re wrong in any case. Béchamel is a white sauce variation, not the thing itself.

White Sauce is a combination of milk, butter, and flour that produces a medium-thick, pleasantly mild sauce that serves as a sort of culinary blank slate for all sorts of foods and flavours. For budget-limited cooks, it is the “extender” par excellence, and for that reason alone deserves its place as one of the foundations of home cooking.

White Sauce Recipe

1 cup of milk
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons flour
1/4 teaspoon salt*
pepper
(nutmeg)
*If your butter is salted, reduce this quantity by half

Begin by heating the milk, either in a double-boiler until steam starts to rise off the surface, or for 1 minute in the microwave.

While the milk is heating, melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Do not let the butter brown.

When the butter’s melted, reduce the heat to low and stir in the flour and salt. Let the roux, as the flour and butter mixture is called, cook for 1 minute, then remove it from the heat until the milk is ready. Do not let the roux brown.

Return the heat to medium and set the saucepan back on the burner. Using a whisk, incorporate the hot milk into the roux a little at a time, whisking constantly so the two blend together smoothly.

Continue cooking and stirring until the sauce achieves a medium-thick consistency. Do not let it boil, as this imparts an unwanted sweetness. I use a wooden spoon for the last bit of stirring because it’s easier to keep the sauce from sticking to the bottom and sides of the pan.

Season with a few twists from the peppermill and, for a wonderfully pleasant flavour that marries beautifully with all sorts of foods, a small grating of nutmeg.

That’s it. Perfect white sauce, ready for whatever use you can think of.

In my next food-related article, I’ll discuss some of the things you can do with our marvellous culinary blank slate.

Living poor, Part II:Spend less, do less harm

I wrote in my blog post June 24 that money is the lifebood of civilization. We cannot function without it.

In any large-scale social grouping, two attributes, paradoxically opposed, are needed for survival: self-sufficiency and cooperation. We have to be able to accomplish some tasks on our own, and to work together to accomplish others. Money provides a framework for achieving both. Self-sufficiency comes from financial independence—the ability to buy what one needs—and cooperation in the form of income-earning work. It’s all conceptual, of course, illusory. Real self-sufficiency is making everything you need yourself and raising your own food, while true cooperation happens for no other reason than there’s need. Without money, few of us are truly self-sufficient, and without a steady paycheck, few of us prepared to work in needful joint endeavours.

This is not to cast aspersions, but rather to underline why money is essential. The notion of “value”, transferable between goods, services, and labour through the use of symbolic tokens, eases the burden of self-sufficiency and provides an incentive for cooperation.

No, we cannot do without money. And yet...

– the produce you buy at the supermarket is shipped from half a world away, creating a huge carbon footprint; most of it is grown as destructive monoculture crops; chemical pesticides, fertilizers and significant water diversion were likely involved; underpaid and unprotected migrant workers or impoverished native populations were used to harvest it

– the clothing you purchase was almost certainly made in a sweatshop

– the gasoline you fill your tank with on the way to work pollutes the atmosphere; wars are fought to keep the oil it comes from flowing

– money from the pills you buy enriches companies who manufacture deadly chemicals that enter the biosphere; the same companies then turn around and sell you drugs to treat the diseases they have caused

– the house you’re paying too much for—or selling for too much—inflates the cost of real estate, impoverishing millions and dooming many to homelessness

– the electricity you burn through comes from dirty, coal-fired generators, unsafe nuclear plants, and land-destroying damns

– the insurance premiums you pay on your hourse, your car, your belongings are invested in corporations that operate without regard to human rights, safety, or dignity; the environment is treated with the same contempt

– the treat you give yourself for being a wage-slave—a resort holiday on some impoverished island—adds to global warming when you fly there and come back, and furthers the social inequity endemic to poor nations

And that’s just what happens when you spend money. For many, earning it has consequences equally as dire. Flipping burgers at a fast-food joint contributes to the epidemic of obesity afflicting North America and encourages destructive land-use policies. Working for a financial institution means you’re helping those without a conscience play with capital—buying, selling, investing—wrecking lives and the environment without a second thought. Your factory job depends on manufactured obsolescence. Your farming job requires you to plant and harvest crops that have been modified so that the seed can’t be collected and you have to pay each year for something nature gives for free. Your teaching job demands that you train worker drones to feed the maw of finance rather than instructing students to become mature and thinking members of society.

If money is the lifeblood of civilization, then we must conclude that, at present, the blood is poisoned. Virtually every time we spend it, we are doing harm somewhere, and the hours we put in earning it are scarcely less damaging. There is no escaping; we must earn and spend in order to survive, yet doing so incurs a host of evils which, if left unchecked, threaten to destroy the Earth.

“Living poor”, as I have come to call my way of life, is not intended as a solution. It is not a cure. It is a response, an individual commitment not to worsen things, to minimize the damage done by money. It is a decision to devote oneself to real productivity and fruitful pursuits. It begins by valuing one’s social, creative, intellectual, and spiritual aptitudes higher than a paycheque, thereby enabling a life of conscience, not expedience. The choice is hard since it means limiting expenditures, forgoing convenience, overcoming laziness, and acquiring skills the poor the world over practise to survive.

Living poor need not be all-or-nothing; taken to extremes it risks fanaticism. Rather, it’s a guiding ethos, best described by questions: Am I learning to survive with less and still feel full? Am I maximizing the utility of everything I buy? Am I sharing what I can, even it it means I have to tighten up my belt? Am I seeking entertainment in the company of others, not expensive toys? Can I ask for help in need, knowing that I give it freely?

Living poor, as I see it, is taking on the role of conscientious objector in a war that’s being waged against the Earth and all humanity. The poor are not responsible for plundering the globe and spreading misery to every hemisphere. The poor don’t waste. The poor don’t wage imperial wars. The poor don’t despoil the environment. Furthermore, the poor know how to share. The poor know how to sacrifice. The poor know how to work together. Joining them by learning to get by with next to nothing will not stop the war, but it minimizes harm and announces that you won’t partake in something that runs contrary to conscience.

Living poor

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this life-project I call “living poor”. It started years ago, when I dwelt in Québec. I’d come to realize that no matter how hard I worked, no matter what the pay, I would always be struggling for money. Furthermore, I would always feel beaten down by the knowledge that I was being personally and creatively unproductive during the hours I worked.

For as long as I can remember, I have felt the overwhelming pull to practise what I’m called to do: be of service to others, and to contribute to the world from my creative and intellectual abilities. I do not fancy myself a superior talent worthy of fame or fortune, but I’m a competent and thorough craftsman in a number of areas. There is need for what I do, though it rarely pays, and I will not rob the world of skills I possess by devoting myself to the singular pursuit of an income. Time to write, to compose, to programme, to shop/cook/clean for friends who cannot, to teach and tutor, to be there for people in crisis—this is more valuable than any paycheque.

The pursuit of money dirties everything it touches. There’s a reason why the expression is “filthy lucre”, not “lily-white lucre”, and why money is “laundered”. I’m deeply uncomfortable receiving money for services from people who have no money to spare, especially when those services cost me nothing. I would rather the gratitude and trust of the out-of-work friend whose résumé I prepare than the cold insult of cash.

Lest I be thought naive, it is the pursuit of money that troubles me, not the thing itself. The symbolic exchange of value for value—my bushel of turnips for three copper coins; three copper coins to pay the blacksmith for a hoe—is a necessary convenience. There is much good that cannot be accomplished without it, at least not in societies whose members do not function well cooperatively, such as ours.

An oft-repeated caution is that money is the root of all evil, but the original formulation, in Latin, speaks the truth more clearly: Radix malorum est cupiditas—love of money is the root of all evil.

Our society worships money, and what greater love is there than worship? Practically from birth we we are taught to revere money. Those born into it learn it confers prestige, privilege, and ease. It sets them apart from ordinary mortals. Those less fortunate grow up yearning to acquire it. It has, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and the concomitant enshrinement of capitalism and the growth of the middle class, become our Holy of Holies. Not to base one’s life upon its acquisition and expenditure is to reject dogma and commit heresy.

The problem with worshipping anything is that the love is not reciprocal. The object of worship, or what it represents, doesn’t love back, except that we imagine it. An acquaintance of mine, a wealthy one, once opined, “You have to love money if you want money to love you.” A clever quip, one designed to make most people nod in rueful agreement, but untrue. The ardent pursuit of money, whether much (say, by gambling on the stock market) or “enough” (eg by earning a steady income), whether attended by success or failure, has wasted far more lives than it has enriched.

None of this is new. It is self-evident, if one takes but a moment to think about it. Or perhaps not so self-evident. Throughout history, prophets and teachers have had to repeat the message. The Buddha. Jesus. Mohamed. Francis of Assisi.

Thoreau, in the first chapter of Walden, “Economy”, famously summed up the personal consequences of devoting one’s life to the pursuit of money: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” [The italics are mine.]

Anyone who bucks the trend of “job at any cost” is marginalized in our society. The decision to embrace living poor is labelled laziness, advantage taking, illness. Irony of ironies. The middle class and wealthier drive everywhere instead of walking, buy pre-prepared and processed foods they could have made themselves, have machines to do their dishes and their laundry and their yard work, throw things out instead of fixing them, buy new socks instead of darning them. That is laziness. The same class fuels the trend to “more for less”, a hallmark of consumerism that enslaves the poor—half a world away so as not to trouble conscience. And are not militant rejection of reality, delusion, and refusal to acknowledge undisputed facts all indicators of a mental illness?

Alanis Obomsawin, an Abenaki from the Odanak reserve, said in 1972: “Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.”

Again, not new. Again, self-evident. Yet we act as if it isn’t. We elevate the pursuit of money as a means unto itself, deny that our thinking is circular, and stick our fingers in our ears and shout la-la-la whenever someone points to facts like “wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.”

Money is the life-blood of our society, every monetary exchange a beat of its unfeeling heart, which creates a perpetual psychic noise, like real blood rushing through our ears. For the poor, it is a loud, distressing buzz. For the middle-class, a hum, persistent but low-level. The rich, of course, build soundproof mansions.

We can’t escape it. The money-meter never stops. Every second of every day, we’re forced to spend. Rent, electricity, gas, phone, TV, Internet...these suck up money like a vacuum cleaner even while we sleep.

I was talking about this with my roommate, John, the other night. Like me, he’s one of those who’s chosen “living poor”. Both of us have observed something few remark upon: if you live in the city, every time you leave your home you wind up spending money. There’s almost no way to avoid it unless all you fancy is a stroll around the block to take in the sickening air. In fact, most urbanites only ever leave their homes for money, either making it—and getting to work alone can cost thousands per year—or spending it.

In short, our lives are circumscribed by money. It makes vassals of us all. Being a vassal isn’t necessarily a bad thing, provided one’s ruler is benign. Money is anything but. Truly, cupiditas, the love of money, is the root of evil, if evil be the misery inflicted on the people of Nigeria, the human rights atrocities of China, the rioting in bankrupt countries such as Greece and Spain, the sweatshops found in Free Trade zones, the death of workers crushed or burned in unsafe factories, the despoliation of the Earth, and the destruction of the biosphere.

But the most pernicious evil of all is the waste of human potential. When people’s value to society is measured solely by their income, it is tantamount to saying they are worthless otherwise—patently untrue, but so pervasive it is rarely questioned. If you don’t or cannot “monetize” your skills (a sickening neologism), they have no value. You have no value.

Value to what? Why “the economy”, of course, a tool we have elevated to the status of a raison d’être. Activities of real value—to your neighbours, your community, your culture, the globe—are actively discouraged by the credo “if it isn’t earning money then it hasn’t any worth”. Those with skills that fall outside the purview of “employment” lose the opportunity to practise them when “real jobs” become the only thing that counts. Society is poorer for it, but somehow that’s okay because it fuels the economy.

I’m not “against” money. I’m not against commerce. Civilizations need the trust implied by exchanging tokens of value, whether paper or gold or numbers on a screen. I’m not a communist, though I confess to being a committed social democrat. I’m not even against capitalism, when practised with restraint and oversight.

What I am against is wasting time in meaningless employment, which more times than not contributes to the ecological and human ills that threaten to destroy us. I, and others like me, are compelled to use our skills to be of use, not to make a buck. In other times, we might have gravitated to the holy life, as priests or monks, or nuns. Vows of poverty were once respected. In today’s society, we must, instead, commit ourselves to living poor, by which I do not mean “in poverty”, but rather valuing oneself, one’s skills, one’s contributions to the world, as more important than a steady income.

It is not an easy choice. For some of us, it’s not a choice at all, but rather a vocation—which, from it’s Latin root, denotes a calling, a summons to be useful.

Orchestrating with Musescore v1.3 and LinuxSampler

For the past few months, I’ve been exploring Musescore as an all-in-one solution to composing, orchestrating, and engraving original compositions. I’ve already written a tutorial at Musescore on extending Musescore (v1.3) with LinuxSampler, but I’d like to share my thoughts on the more musical side of things, specifically achieving a satisfactory Musescore-generated performance of music written for full orchestra.

If you’re a Musescore user, and interested in this article, have a look at the LinuxSampler tutorial located here. My commentary is based on the setup described.

I started using Musescore simply to engrave pencilled manuscripts that were in danger of fading. The more I worked with it, the more I became intrigued with the idea of using it for prototyping audio versions of my work. Starting off small, just songs scored for a solo instrument with piano accompaniment, I progressed to adding strings, and finally worked up to a small orchestra.

I wanted to go bigger, trying my hand at a full orchestra, but was finding some limitations in Musescore’s reliance on GM soundbanks. No soundbank I could find was perfect. If the strings were good, the oboe would be awful. Or the oboe would be great and the French horns terrible. Since Musescore is JACK smart, I wondered if connecting Musescore’s midi output to a sampler would solve my problem. It did. Using LinuxSampler, I could load any soundfont I wanted and have it correspond to the appropriate Musescore staff.

There’s no dearth of free soundfonts out there, most in .sf2 format, some in .sfz and .gig, all three of which can be loaded into LinuxSampler. The problem is that where quantity reigns, quality does not. Part of that is personal preference, but generally, quality soundfonts that work well as part of an orchestra are hard to find. For anyone interested in midi orchestration, I suggest downloading as many soundfonts as you can find for any particular instrument, then auditioning them, just as you’d do with real players. LinuxSampler has a handy virtual keyboard that makes trying out individual soundfonts easy.

No soundfont is perfect, top to bottom, so what you’re looking for is as close to a “typical” sound in the low, medium, and high registers as possible. A flute that’s acceptable above C5 but sounds oddly metallic between C4 and C5 is no good, whereas one that sounds realistic up to C6 but then gets shrill may, in fact, be usable, since the flute is naturally a little shrill up there.

It’s a good idea to have several soundfonts available for each instrument. Depending on the overall orchestration, you may find that that trumpet that sounded dreadful with one combination of instruments works perfectly with another. You will also want a choice between “solo” instrument samples and samples that fit well into an orchestral fabric.

In the woodwinds, stay away from samples with overly noticeable vibrato. A little vibrato can offset the fact that you aren’t working with instrument sections—essentially, you’re scoring one instrument per part—but too much stands out and usually sounds cheap. The only exception to the rule is the oboe, which in midi scoring seems to blend more naturally when there’s a distinctive vibrato. This is true not only of, say, oboe+flute in octaves, but also when the oboe is reinforcing a section of strings.

Usable brass is hard to find, particularly the all-important French horns. The problem is that most of the soundfonts I came across have far too much character, suitable for solos but too distinctive for orchestral work. Nearly all of them have too much bite, so I’d advise looking for soundfonts that minimize it; otherwise, balance with other instruments becomes next to impossible.

The string section presents the hardest challenge. Plenty of soundfonts exist, but none can hope to be completely satisfactory. Such is the nature of strings, where expressivity in both timbre and articulation are all important. I learned a few tricks in Musescore that help with the problem, which I’ll get to further on. While you’re auditioning soundfonts, you should be listening for string sections that display a good medium legato (not too slow on the attack) as well as timbrally similar sections of strings détaché. Marcato, too, depending on your needs.

Pay particular attention to the timbre of the soundfonts in all the registers from contrabass to stratosphere. There are a number out there specifically for violin, viola, cello, and bass sections, but I didn’t find them as useful as the more generalized “strings” soundfonts. A few make excellent first and second violins; others make great cellos. Miraculously, some even sound like violas.

For pizzicato, a general “pizz. strings” soundfont is usually sufficient for all sections of strings. An “acoustic bass” soundfont, ie a single plucked contrabass, makes a helpful stand-in for pizzicato basses when the scoring is light.

Harp, percussion, and piano are usually intended to stand out from the surrounding orchestration, so the choice of soundfonts is very much a question of personal preference.

Don’t overlook the large GM banks (like FluidGM or Merlin) when hunting around for samples. You can load individual instruments from them in LinuxSampler, and there are a few gems.

Once you’ve got a library of soundfonts, you can start setting up “orchestras” in LinuxSampler that correspond to your scoring needs.

Balance is everything, and one thing that’s certain is that your soundfonts won’t all be of equal volume. My way of dealing with the problem is to create a test score in Musescore composed of long whole notes, one per instrument in succession in their middle range: the flute plays a whole note A5, then the oboe an A4, then the clarinet an A4, etc. By default, Musescore sets note velocity to 80, which I use as a mezzo-forte benchmark. I adjust the levels with Musescore’s mixer until all the instruments are producing a satisfactory mezzo-forte at a velocity of 80. (An alternative is to leave Musescore’s levels alone, and adjust them in LinuxSampler. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.)

Using 80 as the note velocity for mezzo-forte lets you to divide dynamics into useful increments of 20: 20=pp; 40=p; 60=mp; 80=mf; 100=f; 120=ff. The 20 provides room for expressive phrasing within a particular dynamic, and to compensate for the dynamic differences between high and low registers. Allocating dynamic levels this way gives a fairly reliable approximation of the balance of instrumental forces you would hear from a live orchestra—essential when prototyping a score. It also allows you to improve the sonority when parts are doubled—say, two trombones playing unison. If you increase the velocity by 10, the sonority increases while staying within the same dynamic range.

Be careful of horns, though. You may want to decrease their levels in the Musescore mixer, since horns do not have the same carrying power as other instruments and often have to be marked one level louder in the score than the prevailing dynamic. If the trumpets and trombones are playing mezzo-forte, it’s certain the horns will have to be marked forte if you’re after an even balance. However, if the horns’ mezzo-forte velocity is identical to all the other instruments, marking them forte and setting their velocity to 100 results in horns that are too loud.

Achieving a reasonably close correspondence between the dynamic markings in the score and the assigned note velocities is essential. If a bassoon phrase is marked piano, you don’t want to have to tinker around with note velocities (in the Note properties dialogue) until it “sounds right”. It’s much easier to mark the passage piano and set all the notes to a velocity of 40, assured that the bassoon is then playing a good, uniform piano.

There’s still an awful lot of tweaking to be done, but for a “first pass” at your score, achieving a good, overall balance of dynamics between parts makes fine-tuning much easier.

Strings, as I’ve mentioned, present particular challenges. There are some very expensive commercial VSTs out there that offer good strings with a wide choice of articulations and dynamics, but when scoring with Musescore, your options are limited.

The problem with string soundfonts is articulation. Legato, or “slow”, strings have a very gentle, long attack and are unsuitable for even medium-fast passages. Conversely, most “marcato strings” (usually détaché, not marcato) have an aggressive attack, almost like a series of downbows, making them unsuitable for legato phrasing.

I deal with the problem by assigning a legato-strings soundfont to the Musescore’s “normal” string channel, and a marcato-strings soundfont to the “tremolo” channel. (Real tremolos I write out in full and make invisible, generally on Voice 4 of the staff.) To switch between articulations, I create staff text saying which I want, then go into the “Staff text properties” dialogue and select the appropriate channel. Afterwards, I set the text invisible.

It isn’t possible to get marcato strings to approach legato, but there is some leeway going the other direction. This is fortunate because repeated notes in a legato strings soundfont tend to blur together owing to the very slow attack and decay. The problem is fixable in the Note Properties dialogue, where it’s possible to change the “offtime” of a note to a negative value, effectively shortening its sounded length without altering its written length. Depending on the tempo and note-length, I find setting the offtime between -5% and -10% is usually enough to make repeated notes heard as such.

Upbeats, especially short ones, can be a real headache with legato strings unless some other instrument is sharing the upbeat and can mask the slow attack. The solution to this problem is to set the ontime to a negative value, which starts the note a little sooner than normal. Adjusted carefully, you can get the sustain phase of the note’s envelope to fall directly on the upbeat; the early attack is scarcely audible. Another solution I sometimes use is to increase the velocity of the upbeat drastically. If the upbeat’s short enough, the note never gets a chance to reach peak velocity and may sound weak simply because it’s too soft.

Unfortunately, there is no quick or easy solution to crescendi and diminuendi, which must be worked out “by hand”, making progressive adjustments to the velocity of every note in all parts of the passage. The “mf=80” system I use does help a bit, in that I can reliably in/decrease the velocities in all the affected parts by the same amount, say by 3, then 5, then 7, and so on. However, it’s worth noting that crescendi and diminuendi, like rit., rall., and other rubato, are rarely executed according to mathematical principles and sensitive ears are required to make them properly musical.

The one place where all bets are off is orchestral tutti. Balancing tutti passages requires knowing the art of orchestration well, scoring accordingly, then simply using your ears to get the synthetic output to sound like what you know the real deal sounds like. Owing to acoustic oddities that pile up the more sampled instruments you have playing together, you may have to in/decrease note velocities radically in certain parts, in despite of orchestral common sense. My song, North, (on YouTube here) has a two-bar tutti that took a day or more to get right.

Reverb is an essential part of orchestration, so I always attach my sampler, the software that’s actually “playing” the music from Musescore, to a reverb app. All things being equal, and my soundfonts having been carefully selected, this provides enough timbral and dynamic realism to let me tinker with the orchestration while I’m composing.

The final step in preparing synthesized audio prototypes of orchestral scores is to apply equalization and compression. This is where deficiencies and eccentricities inherent in the soundfonts can be erased, balance further adjusted, character imparted to various instruments and sections, and the semblance of life infused into what is, after all, canned music.