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Hard-to-read scores - how do you handle them?
Has anyone else been stuck with dreadful musical scores? Here's a fun story about a recent experience.
Our community orchestra has just performed a concert, and now we're starting on some new pieces. Our librarian handed out the parts, and one of the pieces was just dreadful. Notes and bar lines were squashed together so tightly it was just about unreadable, and the page breaks were in ridiculous places.
As principal violist I felt a responsibility to my section to make things easier. So the other night I sat down with my laptop and transcribed the viola part into Lilypond, from which I was able to print perfectly readable copies, with page breaks in places that make sense.
Before yesterday's rehearsal I was handing out the revised copy when our principal second violinist called me over. "You won't believe this," he said, and sure enough the violin 2 part was just as bad as the viola part. He had managed to find a more readable part on IMSLP and was distributing that.
While we were talking about this sad state of affairs, our principal cellist came over. Sure enough, the cello part was equally bad, and she had re-typeset their part as well (although with a different software package).
The three of us went to the concertmaster. The first violin part wasn't too good either, but they were managing to make do.
At this point the conductor walked in. Apparently he was aware of the situation, because the first thing he did was to hand out new parts for all the strings - and they were in excellent shape.
So it was a lot of work for naught for us section leads - although we could look on the bright side and say that at least it gave us a chance to take a really good look at the music.
This isn't the first time I've re-typeset a poorly-written musical score. How about the rest of you? Any good stories?
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