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Arranging 5

Alan Coady

Wednesday 25 October 2006

“One overlooked layout decision – a thousand repeated sentences.” (Ancient proverb from the Province of East Lothian).

Publishing houses have some advantages over instructors when arranging ensembles for schools:

Not teaching 50 lessons per week
Having in-house proof-readers to spot errors in the notes, fingering, position markings, expression marks and matters of general layout – known in the trade as geography.

However, we do have one advantage over publishing houses – the opportunity to test out parts on the very pupils who are going to be playing the piece. If the parts are ready in plenty of time, pupils can have a dummy run through their part before multiple copies of it are printed. Errors spotted after copying would have to be altered by hand on every relevant part, or pointed out verbally - wasting valuable lesson time. The alternative is an expensive reprint. I’ve often found that hurried proof-reading can amount to little more than seeing what I thought I wrote. Going through parts with pupils can flag up many helpful matters.

Years of doing this has led me to include certain layout features:

Rehearsal marks at every junction in the music
Aligning new phrases down the left side of the page
Avoiding a change of page during a run of fast notes – causing the eye to have to move around 25cm in a fraction of a second
Written warnings of pending technical demands – position changes; contraction/extension of hand; particular techniques required (slide, pivot, plant etc.)

Possibly the most helpful layout trick is that of indenting (or separating) sections so that theycan be found quickly:

When returning to a passage in the middle of the piece (D.S = Dal Segno = from the sign)
Jumping ahead to the coda (closing section)
Separating tunes in medleys
Creating exercises where short passages are extracted from the piece for concentrated practice

The following few points might summarise this approach:

Information not on the page must be given verbally
Anything which is said can be forgotten
Get as much onto the page as possible to ensure it goes home with the pupils

On occasions when I have offered arrangements to colleagues in other authorities, some have mentioned that such layout features are not to be found in the big, bad world and ask if I might be putting at a disadvantage those pupils who intend to study music when they leave school. It is a valid point, but my feeling is that these pupils will not be as disadvantaged by the inclusion of such features as others would by their omission.

Comments

re.Blog of the 25th October year 2006 'East Lothian Province'

Pepper.

Thursday 26 October 2006

Sound advice Alan.

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