For the past few years, I have been working as a copyist for a small choral music publishing company called earthsongs.  Music comes in from all over the world, some in oddly formatted Finale files, most in handwritten manuscript, and very few in Sibelius, and they all are sent to me to be refurbished and improved to the formatting standards of the company.  While I was working on a short Latvian piece by Andrejs Jansons, I began to think back to my earlier days of composing, and how awful my scores looked.

It’s funny how many of us go through our musical training not noticing much of the nuance that is put into the intricate written language of music.  I recall several lessons with Dr. David Crumb back during my undergrad where he basically said, “Wow!  Your music really doesn’t look very good.”  He kept telling me that I needed to spend more time looking at professionally published music to understand exactly what he was talking about.  But, as many young composers often do, I disregarded these comments as him just being evil, telling him that I have been staring at music during rehearsals for years by this point.  Little did I know, what I had been looking at were bassoon parts, and what he meant were full scores that conductors would utilize while preparing for a performance (I did not really figure this out until well into the next year of school).

Now, what Dr. Crumb was referring to more specifically were not study scores that one can purchase for $8 online.  While scores from places like Dover Publications are great and affordable editions of music for orchestration study and analysis, they are in no way formatted with the intent of being used for performance.  The publishers that have been referred to me most often are Boosey and Hawkes, and Schirmer, though I’ve seen some nice scores produced by Manhattan Beach Music, and others as well.  What you will find in these scores is not only extreme detail with every element of the music, but a strict and unrelenting use of music notation standards that have been developed and evolved with the progression of western art music – most of which is conveniently held in the pages of Notation in the Twentieth Century:  A Practical Guidebook by Kurt Stone.

The summer after studying with Dr. Crumb, I began working as a copyist for earthsongs, where my training entailed being handed a sheet of paper with some really vague guidelines on it, like “notation should be clean, clear, and full of grace,” and “observe the flow.”  I still do not quite know what these mean, but once I started inputting music into the computer and having lessons with Dr. Ron Jeffers – founder and owner of earthsongs whom teaches in a very subtle but miraculous fashion – I started to notice all of those little things that move music notation from “okay” to “publishable.”  As Ron always told me, each adjustment might not seem like a whole lot, but when you add up all of those little things, it really is a night and day difference.

Now several years later, I’m still getting work from earthsongs, each piece posing a new challenge for my constantly developing notation skills.  To follow the ideology of many of my teachers, we (the copyists) are charged with not only making these pieces look as spectacular as possible, but also teaching and assisting those that wish to develop their own abilities.  An oddly noble profession I seem to have momentarily found myself in.