Finale (music)

A finale is the last movement of a sonata, symphony, or concerto; the ending of a piece of non-vocal classical music which has several movements; or, a prolonged final sequence at the end of an act of an opera or work of musical theatre.

Michael Talbot wrote of the finales typical in sonatas: "The rondo is the form par excellence used for final movements, and ... its typical character and structural properties accord perfectly with those thought desirable in a sonata finale of the early nineteenth century."Carl Czerny (1791–1857) observed "that first movements and finales ought to—and in practice actually do—proclaim their contrasted characters already in their opening themes."

In theatrical music, Christoph Willibald Gluck was an early proponent of extended finales, with multiple characters, to support the "increasingly natural and realistic" stories in his operas that "improved continuity and theatrical validity" beyond the earlier works.

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Finale (software)

Finale is the flagship program of a series of proprietary scorewriter music notation software created by MakeMusic for Microsoft Windows and OS X. First released in 1988, the 2014 version was released in 2013. Finale is regarded as one of the industry standards for music notation software.

Finale is one of a number of types of software used by composers, songwriters and arrangers for creating sheet music, including the score for an entire ensemble (e.g., orchestra, concert band, big band, etc.) and parts for the individual musicians. A scorewriter is to music notation what a word processor is to text, in that they both allow fast corrections (via the "undo" button), flexible editing, easy sharing of content (via the Internet or compact storage media), and production of a clean, uniform layout. In addition, most scorewriters, including Finale, are able to use software-based synthesizers to "play" the sounds of the notated music and record the music—an especially useful feature for novice composers, when no musicians are readily available, or if a composer cannot afford to hire musicians.