Occasional Notes: On Music Copying

Movement I (Allegretto)

Along with the obsolescence of the two-thousand-year craft of copying music by hand,  technology has rendered notation itself obsolete, as composers lean into DAW — digital audio workstations. For that matter, as studios like Lionsgate partner with artificial intelligence firms, giving them “access to the company’s large film and TV library to train a new generative model,” A.I. is threatening film composers themselves with obsolescence.

American folklore tells us that the locomotive, what Indigenous Americans called the Iron Horse, made the horse itself obsolete. For some. But not for cow punchers. And certainly the art of riding remained.  Eadweard Muybridge’s series of six cabinet cards, titled “Horse in Motion,” captured in stills the illusion of the horse’s movement, but not its essence. Not its beauty. Not the mutual respect and trust between a person and their steed.

Streetcar locomotives began replacing streetcar horses around 1850; by 1900 electric streetcars had replaced them both as a method for the conveyance of flesh and bone. And then, as the automobile swept across the land on ribbons of concrete, those parallel ribbons of steel that survived did so mainly because they remained useful, at least, for the conveyance of freight.

Hand copying of “scores” with quill and ink on paper for publication gave way in 1851 with the first use at scale of hand (or “plate”) engraving of music on thin sheets of lead. Music typesetting became a thing, and the 1930s brought the Keating Music Typewriter. All these were used for the creation of the scores to be published and sold to consumers. Hand copying of “performance materials,” that is, the individual note-covered piece of paper from which each instrumental performs their “part,” as extracted by a copyist from the full “score” (or “partitura”) for commercial music, music theater, and symphony concert works continued to flourish well in to the twentieth century.

The beginning of the end came in fall 1988, when the software notation program Finale was released. In other words, notation software captured in ones and zeros the illusion of the copyists’ job, but not its essence. For some. And certainly the art of composing (and of hand copying) remained.

The end of the end began in 1993 when the software program Sibelius outflanked its competitor, called Score, by being more “intuitive” as a creative tool for composers. Notation software made possible in ones and zeros a graphic representation so good that it looked better than most hand human copyist’s work: the illusion of the copyists’ job, but not its essence, had been successfully duplicated. For most people. But not for fine art composers. And certainly the arts of composing and of hand copying remained. But not its beauty. Not the mutual respect and trust between a composer and their copyist.

Of course, it is all part of the dialectic relationship between creation and destruction. Old ecosystems are destroyed; new ones emerge. I put my quill and India ink aside in 2002. Though some hand music copyists still ply their trade, the craft and art of it are now relegated to history.

Movement II (Andante)

I had the skills. I had a clear, attractive hand. I was fast and accurate. Because I worked for a living, I needed the money to buy the time to compose the music I wanted to compose (and it is safe to say that I composed a lot); and some of my peers had the money to buy my time. It is ironic that, even though composers once had to come and go through the back door, certain composers were happy to look down upon their colleagues who copied music to make ends meet. As though commercial viability of the music or personal financial security were a measure of artistic success! How composers and conductors treat their copyists reveals everything about them as people.

My life as a music copyist began in 1975 with nights spent copying the parts to my teenage opuses at the kitchen table in New Berlin, Wisconsin as the sun rose. By 1982, while a composition student at the Curtis Institute, I was working as a professional copyist for the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music in Philadelphia. When I moved to New York City to go to Juilliard, I began fifteen years as a professional freelance copyist with heavy concert music private clients (including my former teacher, Ned Rorem, whose copyist I was for nearly a decade), before serving a final stint as a union copyist on Broadway.

For several hundred years, serving as one’s mentor’s copyist was an integral component of one’s training. I do recall learning more about how Leonard Bernstein made the “Profanation” of his Jeremiah Symphony go in spring 1981 at the University of Wisconsin Madison by hand copying the parts for my turn on the podium as a member of Catherine Comet’s conducting class (I could not afford to rent the parts at the time) than I had in my conducting lessons with Comet. For, if one is really engaged during the process of copying another composer’s parts, one is “playing” the composer’s process the way a pianist “plays” a composer pianist’s piece — one’s brain and fingers are going through the same motions that the composer’s did when they wrote it.

While a composition student at Curtis, I was able, thanks to the thoughtfulness of Philadelphia Orchestra Associate Conductor William Smith, to connect with the orchestra’s librarian, Clint Nieweg, to attend rehearsals of the school’s orchestra with the PO’s library copy of the piece in hand. Bill collected autograph facsimiles of scores and sometimes brought one for me to follow; and the school’s librarian (my work study boss, as I served as his assistant) Edwin Heilakka used to let me follow in Leopold Stokowski’s score (the school had just been gifted his papers). What a marvelous way to learn the repertoire. 

I guess it is true that I have copied every kind of composer for every musical genre — from pop to film, opera to symphonic, academic incipits to television cues, chamber to salon — and a wide array of composers: Rorem, Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, Ezra Laderman, Enno Morricone, Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Diamond, Gian Carlo Menotti, George Delerue, John Kander, George Perle, Virgil Thomson, Joan Tower, Disney, Really Useful, Radio City Music Hall, and more of my peers than I’d care (or am able) to recall. I just looked at that list and thought of a dozen more but cannot make myself go back and add their names, as it feels unnerving, the way that seeing my handwriting on a set of orchestral parts when visiting an orchestra performing something of mine and not even remembering having done the job does.

In the callouses I still have on my fingers and the damage I did to my vision between 1984 and 2004 as a professional hand music copyist, I have in many ways far more in common with Atticus’ literate slaves than I do their master’s friend Cicero. There’s a lot to unpack there, and it has a lot to do with both earning humility and having it thrust upon one.

My first full scores (ambitious 25 minute long juvenaliæ for chorus and large ensembles called Pastoral Mass and The Creation, 1978) were copied with black felt tip marker and black ball point pen (!) back in Wisconsin on that famously canary yellow Passantino 20 stave (Pad 23) and 24 stave (Pad 25) Since first buying a quire of it at Carl Fischer’s beautiful store on Astor Place in 1984, 20-stave King Brand and writing Trio Concertante, my favorite sketching paper has been King Brand. We used Judy Greene vellum from Los Angeles at the Fleisher Collection in Philly, if I remember correctly, but once I landed in Manhattan I became a denizen of Associated Music Service at 333 West 52nd Street. They sold Aztec vellum, which I used for all of my private clients. It’s closed now, but I remember Eileen (it was a family business) behind the counter — always kind, writing up every sale, as there was no cash register — certainly no computers!

There is still some hand copying to be done, but, overwhelmingly, it is done on the computer now. Many composers’ own workflows have come to include writing in digital audio workstations and the young composers who clean up the notation and format the “midi dumps” for composers who don’t notate have taken the place in the ecosystem copyists once occupied. Soon A.I. will do that job as well.

Movement III (Minuet)

Titus Pomponius Atticus (later Quintus Caecilius Pomponianus Atticus, 110 BC – 32 BC) was a Roman banker, editor, and patron remembered for his correspondence with and (at his own expense copied by the hand of and distributed by his educated slaves) support of the philosophical and oratorical writings of his friend Marcus Tullius Cicero. The letters between them are an incredible testament to their friendship and moving in their candor and agape. The name Atticus is familiar to most people nowadays as the name of the father in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. As attorney Finch protected and lifted up his children in the American South in Lee’s book with his stalwart moral courage and sense of justice, the historical Atticus lifted up Cicero.

Authors like Lee name their characters’ with precision, alluding to the characteristics of historical figures to instantly summon an array of associations on the part of the reader. Some parents do, too, when a beloved progenitor doesn’t automatically command commemoration by way of passing along their name. Do they do it hoping that their child will take on those worthy traits? Names and the narrative weight that they carry are important. I am, for example, named after a brother who died in infancy just before me.  In any event, moved by the lives of both of these men – one historical and the other fictional — my spouse and I chose Atticus as the name of our first son.

What father doesn’t dream of a better life for their son? My attorney father, reading Mockingbird to me as a child, voice breaking in the final pages — who’s voice wouldn’t? — lived long enough to see his son live the life of an artist, a Cicero to his Atticus, if you will. Reading Mockingbird to my son when he was small made us both feel the power of names, the sense of belonging and continuum, of history and struggle. I will live to see my son burst into the world as an Atticus.

Would we know today who Cicero was if Atticus had not had his writings copied and carried to the far ends of the Roman Empire? It is impossible to forget that the Gospels were copied by hand — as was every scroll in the Library of Alexandria. The knowledge that survived the Dark Ages did so in manuscripts that were hand copied, mainly by monks.

While I have trouble visualizing Atticus’ literate slaves, it is easy – perhaps thanks to Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs – for me to conjure the image of a portly friar, his faithful cat at his elbow, a quill in hand, an illuminated manuscript before him awaiting his ministrations.

The years spent as a music copyist have helped me to understand the sense in which the monk’s work was more than a job, more than a sort of literary ablution, more even than a calling. From the modern perspective, the illuminated manuscripts might seem to be more a mandala — a testament to impermanence, an attempt to extend into another dimension the ineffable truth of (in a monk’s case) faith. The manuscript in a music copyist’s hands has as its purpose to facilitate a live performance. Perhaps, afterwards, its existence represents what remains when the animation of human actuation is gone, like a plan for a house built of soundwaves.

As the Bible’s words strive to convey the mystery of faith, musical notation strives to convey the effect of song. “From whence cometh song?” asked Theodore Roethke. “They should have sent a poet,” observes the scientist in the film Contact, realizing that scientific language alone cannot explain or describe something that inspires awe. Composer Slavko Krstic once pointed out to me that his mastery of higher theoretical physics and math were one way to commune with the Divine, but that he had concluded that picking up his guitar gave him a clearer signal.

Notated music serves as an imperfect mirror through which the performer steps to enter the world of the piece itself. The performer turns around and faces outwards, from whence he came, and performs what he has discovered for those of us listening on the other side of the bars, the other side of the mirror. I am amazed that anything comprehensible, let alone moving, results.

I think of my priest declaiming the liturgy on those occasions when, Ad Orientem (celebrating Mass facing away from the congregation), the words of the Mass land differently, the performative, ritualistic nature of the recounting of the Holy Thursday story simultaneously more abstract and requiring of one’s imagination because the congregation, deprived of the facial expressions of the celebrant, is compelled to listen harder.

Movement IV (Finale, Allegro con brio)

Iron horses and fleshly ones; hand copyists and engraving software; composers and “music generator apps” like Soundraw; musicologists and monks. There are mathematician fathers finding bliss by striving to number the stars and sons numbering the stars by finding bliss with a guitar. For every bull a matador; for every scientist a poet. Bring on the Ecclesiastes 3:1.

But before a final goodbye to all that, how about a working song, a roundelay about the joys of the work itself?

The walking into the theater, any theater, and delivering parts, getting a feel from the music team how it is going, the showing up at the reading of a new show, or the bonhomie of showing up for the backer’s audition of a Genuine DOA Flop anyway because you copied the reed books.

Leaning over the orchestra pit’s rail, tapping fifteen, squinting to identify the handwriting of the copyist who extracted the parts as a trombone player reads a paperback novel during the intermission.

The music for a show coming in over the fax machine from London with just lyrics, a melody, a bass line, and chord symbols and the directive to make it go, the cigarette smoke, the diazo machine spitting out ammonia fumes, the electric eraser shavings in your pockets.

Reluctantly giving a pre-performance talk at the insistence of the producer to patrons in an empty opera house in Arizona and looking up to see in the back row for the first time in years my librettist for the show, who, possibly between flights and on his way to somewhere else, has decided to see for himself if the old thing still has legs.

The arrogance of “heavy client” copyists, the gratitude of newbies from the provinces, the surprise of residuals, decades’ worth of canary yellow “Local 802 Music Preparation Invoice” sheets lolling like iris tongues from the file cabinets. And the stories: the stories told by the copyists already in their 70s about Garland, Sinatra, and copying music for the networks: Mutual, CBS, NBC, and ABC….

Six of us laughing and cross-talking in a cab on our way to Manny’s with the just-completed and printed instrumental parts of Kander and Ebb’s sizzling new chart for Liza Minelli’s new Vegas show and spilling out onto the sidewalk across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal like pilsner into a tulip glass.

Copying Lion King parts for the Mouse, who stationed a guy by the front door of the office who looked like he was a member of the Blues Brothers Band who we were pretty sure timed us when we went to take a leak. The Case of the Missing Lucky Electric Eraser that began when Brian Fairtile left his go bag in the Winter Garden pit and ended in laughter and tears when, retrieving it, we read the graffiti on the pit wall that said, “They’ll never get the Cats smell out of this pit.”

Drinking coffee and listening to the Portuguese cast album of Company, wondering how all those syllables could possibly be flying by at the rate that they were while trying to identify who the composers were in some of the older black and white pictures of clients on the walls, the beat-up spinet where emergency songs got written, and, as at Fleisher down in Philly, stories about WPA copyists, hard drinking, and the blacklist.

Atticus commissioned. Cicero orated. The monks illuminated the manuscripts. Those of us who were members of the Local 802 were Teamsters. My copyist colleagues were the most resilient, humblest, kindest, smartest, and wisest musicians I’ve ever known. I am proud that I was accepted by them as a colleague when I finally landed in Gotham. We were more than the batmen to our composers, far more than assistants to our employers. People like Mathilda Pincus and Arne Arnstein were legends for a reason.

For years Brian kept a copy of Wine Connoisseur atop his satchel at the office where we worked until, over seder, he and his brilliant spouse told Gilda and me how he intended to quit music copying and become an import-export buyer, like our friend, composer Stephen Dembski. His personal reinvention, from Broadway horn player to copyist, had now been from copyist to wine expert. The best all-around copyist I ever knew.

We were part of traditions that stretched back to the age of Christ. We were the angels witnessing the act of creation and — when it needed a hand, giving it one. We all remembered every piece we ever worked on until we didn’t. And, you know, even though we were all entirely aware of exactly who our clients were as people and as musicians, and of how little we mattered, and who our clients sometimes thought they were in relation to us, none of us ever ran them down. After all, we all become obsolete eventually. It was an honor to serve. Write on. 

Into the Weeds: On Vocal Scores

On a shelf in a hallway connecting the chorus and band rooms at Pilgrim Park Junior High School in Brookfield, Wisconsin in spring 1976 dwelt 30 copies of the vocal score of Georges Bizet’s Carmen. Wallace Tomchek, our charismatic, terrifying, wildly gifted, somewhat mad chorus teacher, told me that he intended to stage it one spring, “if ever I have the voices.” An opera? I asked, dazzled. “Possibly the best,” he answered briskly, pulling a score off the shelf and tossing it to me the way that, three years later, literature teacher Diane Doerfler would toss to me a copy of John Cheever’s short stories with a mischievous grin, singing, “Here, read these; he mainly gets it right.” I don’t think that the biology of mustering enough teenage choral students to mount Carmen ever worked out for Wally, but I already intuited that I would be an artist, probably a musician or writer, when he told me to keep the score only a year or two before my brother Kevin gave me the vocal score of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd for Christmas, thereby cementing my love affair with opera. I treasure both vocal scores to this day.

That year, Wally required that our parents all purchase for us copies of the beautiful 1970 gold-covered Williamson edition of Rogers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. Wally had (rightly) determined that I was at best supporting actor material and had cast me as Max, a role so integral to the show that they cut his songs when the movie was made. “Piano Reduction by Trude Rittman,” I read on the title page.

Over time, I came to know (in my heart and in my hands both) and love the smoothly schmoozy feel of playing Frank Loesser vocal scores; the cooly precise, Ravel-like fussiness of Stephen Sondheim’s; the gnarly, saturated chromatics of Richard Strauss’ own piano reductions, with all the heavy lifting in the thumbs and index fingers of both hands; Kurt Weill’s flinty, Hindemith-y piano reductions to his own (European) scores, followed by the more Gershwin-y feel of his (American) scores; Jack Beeson’s scholarly, sensible reductions of his own shows — especially Lizzy Borden; the richly pianistic vocal scores of Marc Blitzstein for his own shows, which feel as though one should be singing them at the piano whilst playing. Things begin to run off the rails with George Gershwin’s own piano reduction of Porgy and Bess, which requires a real pianist — ironically, the hardest music to play is the transitional stuff, which gets all Gaspard de la nuit and requires real chops — to pull off.

Then there are the vocal scores executed not by the composers themselves but by associates: the practical, uninspired, not particularly singer-friendly Erwin Stein reductions of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes and Billy Budd, which I love, but which do not feel good to play; the noble piano reduction by composer John McGinn of John Adams’ Nixon in China — a real achievement — both playable and fun; Noel Coward’s marvelous, splay-fingered vocal scores executed by Elsie April, which always made me want to have a martini at hand; the co-blended vocal score of West Side Story, which is harder to play than it needs to be, and requires the pianistic athleticism of a keyboard jock to get through.

One of the most inspiring things about the lyric theater — by which I mean live theater or film in which people start singing now and then or all the time — is its compulsively collaborative nature. “Composer” can mean the person who wrote the tune, supported by an arranger who either adds chords or serves as an amanuensis to a composer playing by ear, as well as a “dance music arranger” who takes the tune and develops it for a dance sequence. Robert Russell Bennett used to write the overtures to the shows that he orchestrated for Rogers, and for Cole Porter (despite having the chops, having studied orchestration with Vincent D’Indy), for example. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights score was powered by Bill Sherman and Alex Lacamoire, who transcribed, arranged and orchestrated the show.

Musical departments gather and congeal based on time constraints and trust: John Williams and Conrad Pope, because of the speed at which musical materials must be generated for film; Leonard Bernstein and Irwin Kostal / Sid Ramin, who were given detailed “short scores” for execution as a 27 piece pit arrangement for West Side Story, freeing up Bernstein’s time so that he could be “in theater” and able to make changes quickly to a rapidly evolving, choreography-heavy show. Or Sondheim and Jonathan Tunick, whose signature sound is as recognizable as was Robert Russell Bennet’s and as important to the success of the shows on which he works. Which brings us back around to the queen of them all: German composer Trude Rittman, whose Sound of Music reduction was just the tip of the iceberg of her involvement in some of the greatest scores in the American Musical Theater.

In fact, the core piano vocal score documents — disciplined, vocally-supportive, easy-to-play while following a conductor’s stick or coaching a singer — of the American MT repertoire are nearly all Trude Rittman’s superb handiwork: Rogers’ great scores (Carousel, South Pacific, Sound of Music, The King and I); Frederick Loewe’s (more ornate, harder to play) Camelot, My Fair Lady, and numerous orchestrations, dance arrangements. What a treat it was to run into her handwriting, and to learn the handwriting styles of all the great orchestrators when I used to hand copy music at Chelsea Music back in the day.

The number of composer executive chefs in the kitchen, the number of sous-chefs, line cooks, and pastry chefs is dizzying and — if one has a taste for playing in a pit or singing on a stage — pretty cool. (The role of composer is entirely different in commercial MT than it is in opera. For example, when Burt Bacharach got the flu and ran behind in delivering songs for Promises, Promises the producer threatened to take on another composer to finish the score.) With all the different crews crafting performance documents in the living theater, there are bound to be myriad variations on what constitutes the best sort of piano reduction for a show. Usually, they come to us like love letters left after the end of a love affair, sitting in a box at a place like Chelsea Music in Manhattan, founded by Don Walker and Mathilde Pinchus, with the name of the show stamped on the side and a big “piano conductor” score bound archivally, leaning hard either to the left or to the right, there to stay until Broadway’s lights (or the office lights) are extinguished for good —  or until the creative teams’ heirs transfer the papers to some university’s archives. Otherwise, they sit, awaiting the next revival.

Piano conductor scores consist of a playable piano part and other lines that contain meaningful countermelodies and “fills” that can be assigned to whomever has been hired for the production at hand. They’re sometimes conducted from (Boosey and Hawkes only brought West Side Story’s conductor score out a few years ago, for example), but, usually, the show’s producers have spent just enough on the music to get the cast album in the can and then — man, I’ve seen shows where the “p/c” and the orchestra parts were just left on the stands at the recording session and then … lost, because the show’s impact was so ephemeral and nobody thought it would ever be revived. Anyone who has played a semi-professional community playhouse production of anything has played out of these books (which have gotten pretty slick — particularly when an outfit like Disney owns the copyright), and which often have the name of the player and the city where the “bus and truck” tour last ended. It is such great insider theater lore.

In the musical theater, pianists accept as a matter of honor that their vocal book is itself a malleable, living, evolving thing, and that errors and inconsistencies will crop up during production(s) over the years as changes for various situations are made and unmade. Cuts are made and sewn up, transitions massaged, songs added and dropped.

American opera composers sometimes emerge from the musical theater tradition and are abashed when pulled up short by opera repetiteurs and rehearsal pianists, who typically expect their scores to have been “frozen” and edited. Opera pianists can’t really be blamed for feeling taken advantage of, since they’re being pulled out of their professional comfort zone if they have never ever coached or played a musical. Their default stance is often (though not always) that the composer didn’t have enough common sense or experience to simplify their short score, either by simply supporting the singers the way Rittman’s scores did or leaving them to their own devices and simply presenting the orchestra parts, as Stein’s did. They can hardly be blamed for feeling that, not only do they have to watch the stick, coach the singers, but also piece together an idiomatic part to play.

There’s a lot to sort out here. Full disclosure: It should be obvious by now that I grew up playing shows and operas from all sorts of scores and truly enjoy coming to terms with the different ways that they come to us. I began my opera career fourteen operas ago by crafting my first piano reduction based on the Britten / Stein model with a dash of Rittman. I’ve come at each score with a fresh ear, hoping to capture the psychology of that opera, but — for better and for worse — I have never “coddled” singers by doubling them in the orchestra unnecessarily and I don’t do it in my vocal scores. Because I have always loved browsing the stacks and learning repertoire from the page, I’ve loved crafting the vocal scores myself to my theatrical works.

Decades ago, David Diamond asked me to orchestrate his opera The Noblest Game for Christopher Keene but I said no; Bernard Rands asked me to make a piano reduction of his opera Vincent — ditto, no. Lenny asked me to try to complete Blitzstein’s unfinished Sacco and Vanzetti but there just wasn’t enough of a torso there to flesh out. Back then, I did do the rehearsal piano reductions (still another set of traditions and protocols) of Ned Rorem’s English Horn, Cello, and Flute Concertos for Boosey, but that’s where my career as a latter-day Rittman came to a close.

I myself never, ever use arrangers or orchestrators. Well, I did once and, regretting it, determined to never take that route again. It’s just not my way. I have always composed into full (or, if rushed, a detailed short) score, even when the commissioning agreement calls for a piano reduction first to facilitate workshops. Perhaps, one day I will leave making the piano reduction of one of my operas to someone else, because it is a lot of work, or maybe just to see how it feels. It will probably be done better than I could do it. Maybe when I write an opera without words.

In any event, here are a couple of anecdotes that illustrate the level of mutual forbearance, respect and trust required of opera composers and opera coach / repetiteurs to get the work done.

I remember the conductor of an early revival of my opera Shining Brow who added thirds and (often) unresolved 7ths and 9ths to the piano reduction I had made when coaching. He explained that it helped the singers to find their pitches (I had followed the Britten / Stein model). At the first orchestral read-through, the singers had trouble finding their pitches because they had relied on the extra notes he’d been feeding them.

Another time, during a revival of Amelia, for which the original commissioning contract had stipulated that there would be two pianists for rehearsals, the pianist took me aside and said, “With all due respect, you could have given me a piano reduction instead of a short score to coach from.” The next revival, the pianist, playing out of the newly simplified score, admonished me to put in instrumental cue names so that he could tell the singers “what to listen for” when coaching. (In musical theater scores, such cues are common, and I often put them in, but, for that generation of the vocal score I had removed them.)

Coaching the original cast of Vera of Las Vegas from the keyboard (as I had my previous shows) in Las Vegas, I had delighted in getting every articulation right, every musical style just so, every mannerism notated. Twenty years later, during a European tour, I laughed with the band over beers when they said, “Jesus, you were specific. We know what you want. Trust us. Take them all out.” Too late, the score had been “frozen” years previous.

Some operas, like Orson Rehearsed, are modular, and incorporate lots of un-notateable electronica. Imagine my brilliant conductor’s consternation when the otherwise beautiful vocal score he was using to coach his singers didn’t capture exactly what the electronics were doing. “Once I figured that out, I was fine, but before that, it was touch and go.”

The vocal score of The Antient Concert was, first and foremost, a document of the string quartet arrangement with which the work was first premiered. Jocelyn Dueck, the coach and repetiteur for the original workshop at the Princeton Atelier, was comfortable “dropping” phrases when she needed to so that she could support the singers. The result was that she played an opera score like a musical theater score. She really “got” what I gave her, and I was grateful. When the score was published, I wanted to make sure that the fact that it was not a piano reduction was made clear, so I placed on the title page “Vocal Score by the Composer,” which some clever librarian somewhere catalogued as “Vocal score by [sic] the composer.” Everyone’s so smart.

Recently, I returned to the 2013 piano reduction of A Woman in Morocco to transform it into a Rittman-style score that could be used by traditional opera coaches. In my original development score I found notes given to me by Kathleen Kelly during a developmental workshop of the piece years ago in Texas. An extraordinary pianist, coach, and conductor, she had done such an excellent job preparing the singers before I got to town that, when she asked me about some of the French that I had set in the score, I trusted her enough to ask her to “fix” my French prosody as she saw fit and to teach me afterwards what she had done. I remain grateful.

The musical director (conducting and playing out of a “piano / conductor” score) of a revival of Vera of Las Vegas revealed to me that he had had no problem cueing the drummer in one city, but that the current drummer had sworn that the part was unreadable because several of the instruments were on different lines than he was used to. (He was fired and another person engaged.) “He came to look at his part in the piano / conductor score, laughed, and said, ‘this isn’t an opera, it’s a cabaret. I shouldn’t have to play exactly what’s written!’”

One time, during staging rehearsals of another show, I was asked to step in to accompany a staging rehearsal in which the conductor was consistently behind the beat. I took it as long as I could before (I was younger then) started accompanying the singers and ignoring the stick. The scene, which had been slow and aggravating, sprang into motion like a racehorse. I was thrilled. Finally, I had to admit to myself that I was doing the production a disservice because the conductor had just started following me; as soon as I resumed my place on the sidelines, the old tempi returned.

What have I learned? That every vocal score should be accepted on its own merits because it is the result of the development process by which it was wrought. There is no correct way to execute a vocal score, though a “piano reduction” should be idiomatic and only go to three staves when there’s no other recourse. If a pianist is looking at a “piano conductor” score, then they should know going in that they’ll be required to make a lot of decisions about what to play and what not to. There’s no blame to go around.

Our mission from the piano bench is to prepare the singers, protect them, and support them as best we can. We can’t afford to get lost in the weeds. Our job is stressful and for the most part thankless, but we’re working out of living documents created by people in the thick of creating. Mistakes in vocal scores rarely occur out of ignorance; usually they occur because of lack of experience or time. As a retired Teamster copyist, I’d be the first fella to simply blame the copyist — everyone does. As Lukas Foss used to tell me, “Daron, the ink is wet until you die.” Play on.