I know it's the weekend, and I had just taken leave on Friday, but I'm still exhausted. Part of the problem is the relative heat/humidity and haze combination, part of it is self-identified burn out. But a large portion of it for this weekend is the need to rewrite lots of music to make it easier to execute as a musician. So this is where this post is going---pet peeves with respect to scores.
There are two big camps here, of which I think I'm probably belonging to the fast-diminishing one. There's the hard copy gang, where we either print the digital copies, or have the hard copies directly. Most of the time, we are looking at the music in terms of how many two-spreads there are, and more importantly, how the page turns work. Most music stands can handle three A4-width scores, but it's really uncommon, hence the two-spread set up. Then there's the soft copy gang, where they get a large-ish Android tablet or Apple iPad, and then use some wireless foot-operated page turner to advance the score forwards or backwards. In this set up, the scores are shown as a single page, and the page turns that the soft copy gang works with is at the single page level, which means that two-page spreads are actually antithetical at some level.
I prefer hard copies for music because I don't trust the music stands to be stable/steady enough to not drop the thousand-dollar digital device some 1.3 m to the floor. It also allows easier annotation with a pencil (never a pen, especially if working with rented music).
Regardless of preference, page turns can make/break proper execution of the music. Part of the reason why I learnt how to do engraving using a tool like Lilypond is to give myself a lot more options to tweaking the scores into ways that make it much easier for me to work with when trying to perform off them. The most obvious use of it is when I compactify hymn scores from however many pages there are into a single [A4] page---for the type of hymns that we play at PPCC, most can fit into a single A4 page, and that's with the lyrics. The hymns are generally short with high repetition, which allows the high compression.
So when composers/arrangers present scores that are ``bad'' for execution, I get exasperated. Because having the original digital source allows for typographic adjustments to make the parts easier for the musicians to work from. As an example, I just spent yesterday reworking a 4-page medley (more like 3 1/4-page) into just 2 pages---I didn't even have to change any of the default size of what Lilypond provides. Not to mention that I even managed to salvage some weirdly non-fitting section names from the original score in the reworked one. And I just spent earlier this morning sorting out a 5-page part to fit into 3-pages, with a page turn after the first page where there is actual time to do the turn.
Most of the time though, I do not resort to reworking the music via Lilypond, mostly because the initial data entry is the most time-consuming---I take about an hour per piece, depending on complexity/length. Good old fashioned photo-editing skills to reduce the white-spaces between rows of staff music to reduce something that takes 3 pages into 2 are used more often than rewriting. Recently for the jianpu stuff, I tried something a bit different---I stacked up the three pages into a single image, and then sliced it into half, after altering the aspect ratio to fit nicely into A3 (slicing in the middle yields 2×A4). It worked well without the same time-consuming nature of trying to squish whitespace. But I've not tried it for staff music---I don't think it can work that well. Besides, I can use Lilypond to do something more sophisticated as compared to jianpu, and at that point, it probably makes more sense to eat the cost of the data entry and then auto-tweak it.
I think most people that I know don't really bother going through the effort to do any of these things to make performing the pieces easier for them. I think the first time I allowed myself to do such drastic modifications [on copies of the original] was about 10 years ago during a Dicapella 50-50 project, where an original medley was deconstructed and reconstructed to fit some new criteria. Ever since then, I had less stomach to trying to ``remember'' how to execute, and just do the computer-equivalent of cut-and-paste to remaster the scores to what I need.
Apart from dealing with bad page turns, sometimes when the score is too damn impossible to read fast enough for playing due to legibility reasons, I'd also go down the re-engraving path. And that was what I did for one piece yesterday also. For some reason, the original piece was just a pain in the ass to read. It wasn't the size---even after blowing up the original to make it larger, it still read really bad. I gave up trying to read it, and just re-engraved it. Both still took up only one page, but it was so much easier to read the Lilypond output in comparison. After staring at both scores pretty hard, the conclusion I had in terms of illegibility of the original was that the staff lines were too damn thin, and the vertical aspect ratio of the staff was just off by enough that the note heads were blending into the lines/spaces, making it stupid hard to tell apart.
And I wasn't the only one who found it difficult to read---someone else actually blew up the score too, except it was closer to blowing it up 4× than the more modest 10% that I initially did. Absolutely bonkers.
Anyway, that's about all I have for today. The upcoming week is an exciting one---I get to watch IRyS in concert on Tuesday via live viewing in the cinema at Suntec City. I don't have her merch, but that's not going to stop me to go see YabaIRyS do her singing thing.
And I got Monster Hunter Rise for a steal at 90% off from the Steam Sale, in order to play on Evie-II. I don't know if I'll like it, but I'm off to a slow start. If it's going to play like Elden Ring, then I'd be happy if I can get like ten to twenty hours of fun out of it. Evie-II is starting to have more and more interesting stuff being run on her, and I am excited.
Truly now, that's about it. Till the next update.
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