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Copyist

The job of the copyist is probably one of the most responsible in music - one only need a single experience with badly written out music to know how much time it adds to a rehearsal, and as we all know, in the music business, time is a precious commodity!

I have been trained by composers who highly value notation, and I have taken this practice to heart. I am a detail person by nature, and my hands on experience with music making in many different contexts adds a great sense of responsibility to the way I set out my scores and typeset parts.

I use the industry standard tools of Dorico, Sibelius and Finale, and I have a large body of reference material to make sure that my approach is well executed, including Elaine Gould.

I always use the most modern and up to date methods for presenting music to the performers in order to make their lives easier, even if it means forcing old or badly typeset scores and parts right up to date.

See examples of my work below:

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Transforming this...

inferior nunc image.png

Antiquated clefs modern singers may not be used to

Odd time signatures.

Only one line of plainsong, with no indication of how the inner verses should be sung.

No slurs over melismata - antiquated at best, plain incorrect at its worst!

No reduction for rehearsal.

...into this!

01 - Full score - Nunc Dimittis - 002.png
01 - Full score - Nunc Dimittis - 001.png

Fully written out plainsong for every verse

Better spacing of the bars, thereby reducing visual clutter, and aiding readability and navigation

Fully written out reduction

Standard, tried and tested staff size for choirs

Modernised vocal notation, including slurs for all melismata and beaming for quavers/eighth notes

Bar numbers as standard for navigation

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There are not many editions of the music of François Devienne around, leaving performers with little choice but to use facsimiles of the original. Unfortunately, they are fairly hard to read, as we can see below in the flute part of the 1st quartet op.66:

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No bar numbers or rehearsal marks at all.

Very cramped on the page.

Dynamics are very small and easy to miss. They are also often fouling the stave lines, thus making them harder to read.

Antiquated dynamic typeface. While not necessarily "wrong", there's a reason why the modern dynamic typeface is the way that it is today: it's easier to read!

Unusual placement of the poco forte and the rin forte: not immediately clear which notes the forte applies to.

On a personal note, these facsimiles are not always reliable - when I performed these with my flute quartet, we found a number of errors in them.

Some of these difficulties in reading can be attributed to the limitations of the late 1700s on the poor long suffering copyist who first made these editions in Paris, and others to the antiquated nature of the typesetting: remember that these were engraved by hand on what we'd consider quite primitive tools. These combined, however, make for a much more difficult experience for the performers of today to bring to life the composers of old.

 

Therefore, as I said in my precis above, it is my mission to drag badly typeset music, kicking and screaming, into the modern age. Using my experience, the above part goes through quite the transformation into what you see below:

Bar numbers and rehearsal marks as standard, easing navigation and making rehearsals easier

Much better spacing of the music in a standard 7mm staff size, tried and tested for ease of reading in parts.

01 - Flute - Flute Quartet No.1 Op.66 - 001.png

Standardised dynamic typeface and spacing: it is now perfectly clear to which notes the dynamics apply, as the principle dynamic mark (e.g. Forte or Piano) is positioned under the note to which it starts, as per conventional modern notation practice.

More consideration given for page turns. For example, after this bar, there are four bars of rest: a much better setup for page turns than the facsimile part!

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