On presentation

One thing a composer discovers after having achieved any degree of success (ie getting stuff performed) is that the process of editing and preparing parts takes nearly as long as writing the work itself.  That is to say, it should if done correctly.  This will stem from having a professional work ethic: performers need clear and  considerate parts, with the reward for spending hours making them so being they are more likely to appreciate your work after a smoother read-through. At the moment I am preparing a full set of orchestral parts for The Sun Rising, as well as making minor revisions to the piece before rehearsals start.  This involves (in no particular order):

- Deciding where to place rehearsal marks
- Adding cues
- Adding instrument changes (in this case percussion and between Oboe 2 and Cor)
- Removing collisions between objects
- Laying out parts to provide suitable page turns
- Checking transpositions
- Checking use of mutes/horn stopping
- Checking parts lie within an appropriate clef (viola/bassoon/cello/d.bass/trombones)
- Splitting wind and brass parts sharing a staff in the score to provide a separate part for each of the players
- Adding a second staff for sufficiently differing divisi passages within string sections


Why am I bothering to do all this?  Partly because the performance is the final of a competition and I want to give best possible impression of my work, but also because I have no desire to inflict on others what I have had to deal with myself over the years.  Sibelius is a very useful tool in many of the above tasks: it allows one to edit the parts without affecting the score, will check clefs, mutes and changes for you, and will transpose everything with one button.

I have many pet hates when it comes to poorly presented music.  Mainly these are things that have been devised by penny-pinching editors without any thought to the performer.  In orchestral music we have to read things very quickly, often sight reading on the afternoon of the performance, and untidy or unhelpful scores do no favours for anyone.  For my own instrument, copyists who are unfamiliar with or unwilling to use the tenor and treble clefs in high passages are particularly frustrating, especially those who clearly know of the conventions but use them inconsistently. In the violoncello part of Mahler's Ninth symphony, a bar is erroneously written in the bass clef, with every pitch consequently requiring several ledger-lines.  However, the next few bars jump into the treble, even though the range of this next passage is lower overall than the previous bar!  The fact that older 'arranged' parts or pieces that were originally for band may need to be played by other members of the ensemble offers no excuse, for those instruments most likely to be cued, the bassoon and trombone, also read the tenor clef.

Actually, excessive cues (mercifully found only in older parts, it seems) are nearly as bad as wrong clefs, due to the clutter caused by trying to fit the cello and the bassoon/viola/tuba or whatever other part on to one staff.  A cue is useful if there is likely to be any difficulty in the player knowing where to enter after a rest.  Printing another instrument's part in case it might just happen to be missing is not, especially as very few orchestras above school level will lack whatever it is shown in small font.  Older publishers also tend to have a particularly Puritanical outlook about using as little paper as possible for the part, which only adds to the lack of legibility.  I remember playing Liszt's Faust Symphony (a Kalmus reprint of a nineteenth-century lithograph plate; get it for free on IMSLP) which featured almost unimaginably squashed staves, with dynamics encroaching on neighbouring staves and thirty-two semiquavers forced into a bar less than an inch wide.  (The handwritten part of the Shostakovich symphony I was also doing at the time, of equal length, did not suffer from these problems and was well thought-out).  One can only suppose that musicians in previous ages were simply used to playing from poorly-printed copies - after all, even the most crudely engraved lithograph edition was probably neater than most copyists' pen and ink, and far quicker and cheaper to produce many copies of.  Blunders which can occasionally be found in surviving sets of parts from earlier centuries include chronic laziness, manifested as an absence of time and key signatures after the first line of a piece, or a complete absence of bar numbers and rehearsal marks.  Either that, or rehearsal marks are placed every ten bars rather than at places where is would be useful to re-start the piece from.  I also dislike jazz-style 'repeat bar', and worse, 'repeat two bars' signs (another symptom of 'note-cramming').

One particularly annoying convention relating my instrument only can be found in Dvorak, Bruckner and a few others, which was to write the cello part up an octave when it went into treble clef, a convention which is utterly pointless.  Apart from having suddenly to remember to transpose, the player often had to read as many ledger-lines above the treble staff as he would had the copyist kept the same notes in the bass clef!  Stern warnings against trying to revive this absurdity are printed in most good orchestration books, all of which I heartily endorse.

Modern editions, of course, are largely free from the problems endemic to fuzzy ink-and-blotting-paper technology.  A Barenreiter, Carus, Boosey (usually), Wiener Urtext or modern Brietkopf part is a thing of beauty prepared with due regard for the convenience of the performer.  And yet...despite the neatness of the laser-printed staves issues still arise. On one memorable occasion a symphony required the cello section to divide in two at the bottom of a page, during a passage in which we were fairly prominent.  For the uninitiated, orchestral strings share a stand between two players. In the cellos, the player on the right  (left in the first violins; left in the violas; left in the second violins unless they are sitting opposite the firsts) is always the one to turn the page.  This requires them to stop playing momentarily.  Similarly, when the section divides into two, the same player who turns the page takes the lower of the parts.  You can probably see where this is going.  Placing a page turn whilst the cello section was divisi resulted in the lower line dropping out entirely whilst those formally playing it reached to turn the page. The section could get around this by dividing the two lines between alternate desks, but it should not be necessary to do this (as it involves rehearsal-time-wasting discussion amongst the section).  If the publisher had simply pushed the staves away from the page turn in the overall layout, the problem would disappear.

Things which are simply inconsiderately composed, of course, are no fault of the publisher, and we shall deal with the multitude of sins from even the great composers in a future blog post.  In the meantime I shall return to trying to make orchestral player's lives slightly easier.