Notation and Engraving for Scoring Sessions - Part 3 - Parts

In the last part of this ongoing tutorial series, I was covering the notational conventions of score sheets for scoring sessions. Today, we will focus on the individual instrument's parts.

Strictly speaking, creating parts for the individual instruments is not the job of the orchestrator but of the copyist so the job of the orchestrator usually ends with the delivery of the score sheets. Usually Finale, Sibelius or Dorico files are handed on to the copyist team who take it from there.

However, from my own experience as well as talking with colleagues, recently it is more often required to deliver a full set of PDF files with all parts to a librarian who prints, sorts and binds all the parts. In a way, the orchestrators have taken over 50% of the copyists job.

This development goes in line with the technical development. I started out working as an orchestrator in 2007 on Sibelius Version 5. For the people among you who don't remember that version: it was prior to PDF export functions and prior to introducing Magnetic Layout. So a big part of the work of orchestrating was to move around dynamics and hairpins and all other sorts of markings in the score sheets and parts to prevent them from visually colliding with something else in the score. In complex scores, this step alone took about 30% of the time you spent on the score orchestrating it. Even back then on some orchestration jobs, I was required to also provide the parts as PDF which would mean to individually export and name every part as a PDF via a "Print to PDF" printer driver.

So in tight deadlines it absolutely made sense to bring in someone else who would deal with exporting and creating the parts from these files. Fast forward to 2020 and particularly to Dorico, creating parts from a score nowadays is hardly any extra work anymore. With Dorico, you can trust most of the default choices the software makes for parts and with setting up a proper template, there is basically only the work to double check and accomodate for page turns (see below). Also with Sibelius (never been a Finale user so can't comment on that), things have become much easier but you still need to invest some time to clean up parts.

The parts for a scoring session often don't look much different than a part for a concert piece would look like, there are however a few small details that are common.

Below is the entire Violin I part for my piece GAZING AT THE NIGHT SKY which most of you might have heard if you have been around this Patreon for a while. (Warning: Scrolling ahead)

So as in the last part about score sheets, let me walk you through the important things. Most of these will also apply for any other part for any other occasion (like the concert hall), but where it differs to scoring sessions, I will mention it accordingly.

Transposing Parts:

Parts should always be transposing, meaning for instance that a Horn in F is written a perfect fifth higher than it is sounding. As with scores don't use any specific key signatures in sessions but notate every accidental in the bar. Make sure that any clefs to avoid many ledger lines in the concert score is double checked in the transposing part whether it is necessary there.

Title/Part Name/Page Number

Very often, in scoring sessions parts might be printed at the last moment and not be bound. So the chances are quite high of lose sheets sitting on the desks. It is particularly important in such cases to clearly notate on every page the title of the cue, the page number and the part name so that in cases something gets mixed up or falls to the floor, it can quickly be sorted again based on these informations. In some high profile projects that are highly classified, you might not see the actual titles on the sheets but placeholder or code titles so in some cases the musicians won't even know what they were playing for.

Staff Size

Parts are usually printed on A4 (Europe) or sometimes B4 (USA). One of the most essential things here is to have the staves big enough to be readable at least at arm's lengths distance. The default staff size in parts would be 6.5-7mm which allows for roughly 10 staves per page. Some publishers and copyists create different sized parts for different players. For instance Trombones, Double Basses and Percussion might be further away from the desk than "arm's length" which might require to provide parts with bigger staff sizes for them. Consequentially of course this means more page turns. I personally have not had an instance where I felt this to be necessary and sticking to the common staff sizes didn't get any complaints about reading problems yet.

Bar Numbers

This is one specific for Scoring Sessions: We usually write bar numbers on every bar in parts for scoring sessions. In the concert world, you will usually only have a bar number at the beginning of each staff but the requirement to quickly find a bar with many bars per staff will make it easier to write bar numbers on every bar. Unfortunately, there is no elegant way to do this. Most common are small numbers above or below the bar lines as seen in the example above. In some cases though they might push dynamics quite far away from the staves as seen above in bars 85-87. In the more recent iteration of my notation template I individually place them either below or above depending on the instrument. For instruments that tend to use a lot of high ledger lines (like flutes, violins) I place them below, for instruments with a lot of ledger lines below (Tuba) I place them above. Neither is visually ideal though but the requirement for a bar number on every bar in scoring sessions makes this compromise necessary.

Tempo Markings

In scoring sessions, they should be quite large in the parts as tempo changes are quite often the cause for a take needing to be stopped if someone didn't see the marking. In the part above, the marking is a bit too large and I would make it a bit smaller, however Dorico doesn't allow yet to have different sizes of this text between score and parts so this is a compromise for now.

Page Turns

One of the most important things to get right with parts is to accommodate for page turns. This means that ideally the page turns should happen in a moment where the player has a rest. This of course means that you know how the parts are printed. The default would be duplex printing so that page 2 is on the back of page 1 and page 4 on the back of page 3 etc. This is the default that you should presume. A music stand usually can hold two to three sheets next to each other. With the duplex printing mentioned above, page turns happen after every odd page. So you might want to adjust the parts in a way that the end of page 1,3,5 etc. has a rest for the player so they can turn the page. This premise goes as far as sometimes only printing a few staves on one page or even leave a page completely blank to make page turns possible. In the part above, you can see that I have only two staves on page one without a real rest turning to page two. Up to bar 69 there is no longer rest for the players to accomodate for a page turn but I could predict that we would probably record the intro separately and then move on with bar 10 in a new take. Additionally, with strings two players share one stand so the second player could theoretically turn the page while the first is playing which of course is less obvious in a soft and even decrescendoing note. There is a proper page turn from page 3 to 4. I could have tried to squeeze the two staves from 4 to page 3 but that would most likely have caused visual collisions. In general, you wouldn't want to squeeze too much on page for scoring sessions to allow for possible marks or changes made by the player.

There are a few other ways to print parts however which a good copyist might decide on depending on the material. This is one of the strongest reasons to keep the orchestration and copyist job separate from each other as a copyist might decide to print parts differently and additionally do the page turns differently.

The following possibilites exist:

With parts that are 2 or even 3 pages long that make a page turn tricky, you can print all pages on individual sheets and tape them together next to each other. In this way the player can see all pages without needing to turn pages at all. With very long parts that make it tricky to accomodate page turns, you can extend this strategy and tape them all next to each other and then fold them together. In this case, you only need to accomodate a page turn every three pages as the player can basically move in steps of 3 pages (the max that can fit on a music stand next to each other) through the part. Even more elaboreate would be to duplex print with this strategy. Eg. you have a 12 page part. You could print pages 1-6 next to each other making a turn necessary after page 3. After page 6 the player could turn around the sheets and read 7-9, and with one more turn read 10-12. This would mean to print page 12 on the back side of page 1, 11 on 2, 10 on 3 etc.

If you want to be extra helpful, you would try to not break a phrase on a page turn (even going from p.2 to 3 etc.) as it is more comfortable to read like that. Working out these page turns is still manual work in spite of all the intelligence of notation programs but fortunately this is usually the only step I need to do in Dorico.

Also, you might want to avoid accumulating too many page turns at the same time on too many instruments in a very soft spot as this will create noises in the recording.

I presume that in a few years time, we will most likely only see tablets on music stands with a potential foot switch to trigger a page turn. StaffPad has laid some groundwork for this already but it will probably need some time to catch on and the argument that it is more taxing on the eyes to read from a display is still valid.

Cautionary Accidentals

Fortunately, these are placed automatically by most notation programs nowadays (as long as you activate them). They should be included in the parts (preferably in brackets) to avoid for any reading errors.

Cues

As mentioned already in the last part, cues are usually not necessary in scoring sessions as there most often will be a bar counter visible for all players in the stage that shows where in the piece we are so it's more unlikely to get lost. Cues only make sense as "alternatives" to be decided on the session. So you might want to write in a cue for an instrument that maybe needs to double another one in the session but only when told so.

Rehearsal Marks

Very common in the concert world but hardly used in the scoring session world. In study scores of classical works you might see large boxed letters or bar numbers at the entrance of specific form parts. In the session world, this is usually not needed as they not necessarily are the same where you would start a take or pick up and printinng bar numbers on every bar makes it easy to find the right spot. Also, score cues are usually not that long that it is necessary to apply a system for navigation in the parts.

Extra Space

Some parts include empty staves filling up the last page after the final bar lines to allow for any notes that need to be made by the players. This is not very common but some copyists do it like that. In any case try to not squeeze everything together too much so that players can still add markings to the parts. In most cases a comfortable page turn is prefered over a too cluttered page.

Percussion

Percussion players mostly prefer to get a "percussion score" which means to write all percussion instruments in one part so they can decide as a section who plays what. This of course needs to label the staves in that part and all the entrances clearly. However with this many staves per system it also creates a lot of page turns. You can counteract that by hiding staves that are inactive. I attached the Percussion part for the piece at the bottom of the post as PDF to illustrate what I mean.

Saving Space where possible

Similarly, parts for instruments that use grand staves (e.g. Piano or Harp) should hide staves when not needed to avoid too many page turns. The part for the harp is attached as well.

Some Extra Cases in the Scoring World

Particularly in the USA, it is not uncommon in the session world to not have Violins I and II but to only have a big Violin section. This makes it easier for more elaborate divisi splits in the violins. Usually the pieces are still written for 2 violin sections, but the "big violin section" gets only one part that has the amount of staves per system on them that are needed. If all violins play unison, the part would show just one staff. If they split into Violin 1 and 2 the part would show 2 staves etc. This makes it also easier to rebalance the section during the session in case some line is too weak or too strong. You could simply tell them to put 2 more desks on that line. This would require printing an entire new set of parts if the parts are printed separately for Vln1 and 2. However, in Europe, this approach is not common and should not be used. 

In the next part, we will have a closer look at how to notate dynamics for scoring sessions as they need a bit more attention than what you would write in the concert world.