Alphonse Nguyen

The following guest article was written by my friend, Countersubject.

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Having done co-op in music publication and performed my own music with various ensembles, I realized that there are quite a few things in notating music even professional composers overlook. Sure, you can say I am being nitpicky, but good notation would mean a good performance for your piece. So if you don’t want to be embarrassed by hearing your piece played with strange harmonies and wrong rhythms, you better watch out and you better not cry.

So why and how does a well-notated piece of music contribute to the success of a performance?

A few things:

1. Time is money. Every missed accidental, wrong rhythm, missing rests, or whatever may lead to someone stop playing and ask for clarification. You can eliminate wasting time by being careful. Hiring musicians can be expensive, don’t waste your money.
2. Wrong notes could become right notes. A lot of the time, if you don’t notate clearly, people may not realize that they are playing a wrong note. This is probably not ideal for any composer.
3. Well-prepared scores and parts can minimize practice times for performers. Be it professionals or amateurs musicians, 90% of the time they won’t practice. They might be good players, but they don’t practice. So if you want a good performance of your piece, you better minimize their practice times. And how do you do that? Notate your music elegantly and clearly!
4. You are what you look like on the sheets. People can really tell what kind of person you are just by looking at your written music. If you have fifty thousand collisions, they know that you are sloppy. If you have missing rests or uneven note values, they know that you failed high school math. If you misspell allegretto con larghezza ma senza espressione, they’d think you are illiterate. To avoid your ego being sunk like the Titanic, do your sheets right.
5. Clean sheet music = seemingly easier. Seemingly easier = more conductors willing to take a look. More conductors willing to take a look = more performance opportunity. More performance opportunity = good. Therefore, clean sheet music = good.

What are some of the things I should be aware of?

Well, I will give you 10 pieces of advice:

1. Make sure you put in courtesy accidentals. Musicians can forget that accidentals cancel out after a bar. Furthermore, when you jump octaves in the same bar, restate the accidental or cancel it.
2. Keep your beats clear. Don’t start a triplet on the ‘and’ of the first and the ‘two’ of the second beat. It’s all too confusing. Beam over rests if you have to, too.
3. When you change time signatures with the bottom number changing, tell your musicians whether the eighth equals eighth or the quarter equals quarter. You have no idea how much this will affect the tempo.
4. Make your tempo markings HUGE. Conductors are sometimes blind old people who forget their glasses and don’t always care. Make your tempo markings HUGE so they can’t complain if they fail.
5. Number your bars, always. This will save A LOT of rehearsal time. Timpanists usually take long naps between their thousands bars of rests. They also can’t count 235 bars backward from letter D, so God bless, give them bar numbers.
6. Fermatas go on EVERY STAFF. It just has to, or musicians are going to start counting and come in early.
7. Write your expressions, tempo, and technique markings in ONE language. A lot of people seem to ignore this rule, but if you don’t want to look like an Italian illiterate because you used ‘ominously’ as a marking, I think it would be wise to write it all in one language. English is preferable, since music isn’t an Italian novelty anymore.
8. On the conductor’s score, you must indicate the approximate duration and whether or not the score is a transposed score.
9. If you use any special contemporary techniques, be sure to have a page in the beginning where you thoroughly explain on it what you want.
10. Make your music evenly spaced. It looks dumb if it’s all spread out. It looks worse if everything’s crammed.

I cannot possibly list you every little notation quirk you should know, but study a lot of scores and see if you can spot peculiarities that are often overlooked. Try to learn what are things you should do or things you shouldn’t do by comparing scores. Now, start proofreading every score you have done. You will be surprised at how many mistakes you will make, because even Ravel had problems with his scores.