Hi all
I don’t know how I came up with it. Maybe I saw it somewhere before. But I’ve been thinking about writing a conductor’s line (as I would call it) for some time now. It’s at the top of the score and includes all the important rhythmic passages, possibly with additional verbal and dynamic indications. Especially when you don’t know the piece well and are rehearsing it for the first time, it might be helpful to follow along with a single line throughout the piece; if there are any issues, you can then look directly below. What do you think, is this helpful or completely unnecessary? Here’s a simple example of what I mean, this is a Big Band arrangement.
I have repeatedly been given advice to include absolute minimal amount of information on scores other than the music itself. I even got feedback that my copyright text on the bottom of each page should be removed as it could be a distraction while reading. In some sense this is correct advice, sight reading and page formatting to maximize the staff while preserving page margins is hard enough without extraneous information.
I have tried to include such a stave in my scores to show musical function or analysis points and have always been told to delete it. Even though I consider it valuable from a composer or musicologist point of view.
So, I dont think that added line would be useful.
Instead I have resorted to creating a separate layout (easy to do) which includes my sketch staves with such information, like you suggest, and I call these Composer Full Score, to differentiate from the separate Conductor Full Score. For the actual conductor, they get the Conductor pdf… then in rehearsal when something comes up about intention or origination of a particular groove or inspirational source or whatever type of compositional question, I use my Composer score to inform the answer.
I have also included a front page of Performance Notes, which includes measures to watch out for, or such rhythmic pattern info etc, but these dont seem to be consulted most of the time… and the Player parts do not include this, so… it is kind of useless, I suppose.
I’ve had the same issue with date stamp on every page – I was asked to put it only on the first page, which seemed reasonable enough.
As for the conductor’s line idea – It is tempting to imagine a conductor’s job as simply rhythm, especially if there is a drummer keeping tempo. But Janus is quite right that to really do the job of directing (and rehearsing) one has to be able to read the whole score and know all the notes.
