I found an excellent link about music typesetting programs:
The program that I tried was MuseScore, which seemed to work very nicely. It seemed a little rough (as in, it crashed a couple of times), but it got the job done for me.
I was able to install MuseScore from Synaptic with the mscore package. There is also a mscore-common package as well.
Are you using version 0.9.5 of MuseScore? (Go to Help > About to find out).
If you are using an older version I recommend upgrading (it fixes several prominent crashes). Instructions are on the download page of the website:
http://www.musescore.org/en/download
Thanks for the comment. I just checked the version and it was 0.9.4. I just installed the version from the repositories. I did see that one of the features that I needed was already added in a later version, but I got distracted before I tried to install it.
I will give it a try.