Who plays what?

I would like to think that I remember everything Prof. Bianchi taught us in his orchestration class. Maybe I don't remember the exact words, but I think I remember all the concepts.

For example, I don't remember what words he used to explain to us that in a score, you have to communicate clearly who plays what. It's obviously not a problem in solo piano music, nor even in string quartet music.

There are two violins in a string quartet, and they should always get separate staves. So in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Quartet in G major, K. 387, when the first violin is silent for several consecutive measures, the whole rests in the first violin's staff readily convey to us that it is the second violin that is playing now, along with the viola and cello.

In orchestral music, when you have ten or twelve first violins, it would hardly make any sense to use ten or twelve separate staves if they're playing in unison the vast majority of the time. It is with the wind instruments (and by that I mean both woodwinds and brass) that clarity of part assignment requires a great deal of painstaking care.

Generally, when you have an orchestra with woodwinds in pairs, each pair shares a staff. This means two flutes on one staff, two oboes on one staff, and so on and so forth, down to maybe two tenor trombones on one staff, and perhaps even bass trombone and tuba share a staff even though they're different instruments.

Let's say this is a staff for two oboes:

Clearly first oboe plays E-flat and second oboe plays C-sharp. No problem. But what if then we have this?

Both first oboe and second oboe are to play a unison D, right? I think they're smart enough to figure it out in rehearsal. But enough details like that, and the rehearsal gets bogged down in things the composer or arranger should have taken care of beforehand.

This would be clearer:

Of course the score and parts should all print out in black ink. I am using direct screenshots from the notation software to underscore the point that these are things for the composer or arranger to mind, not the performers.

It would be even clearer, if, in addition to the stems pointing opposite ways, you add "a 2" or "zu 2" above that.

You might say that this is a toy example. And it is. In Finale 2010 and later (and maybe some earlier versions, too), you can set up linked parts so that the computer will automatically take the top note of the chord and give it to the first player, and give the bottom note of the chord to the second player.

You want to review the parts when you use this feature, there might be occasional mix-ups. But this toy example with the two oboes would present no problem whatsoever. The two oboists would probably not be aware of any issue at all.

Still, this toy example is very typical of situations you will come across if you do even just a little arranging for orchestra or wind symphony. Now I will present a more interesting example, a situation that you may or may not ever come across.

I have mentioned before my ongoing work on orchestrating Clara Schumann's Scherzo in D minor. I might still tweak the instrumentation a little bit, but for the most part, the task ahead of me consists of boring but important details like making sure there are dynamics markings (piano, mezzo-forte, etc.) everywhere they are needed.

There is a passage early in the piece that is obviously a repeat. I don't know if Schumann used repeat signs in her original score but the publisher wrote out the repeat, or if she wrote out the repeat and the publisher didn't second-guess her.

More likely the latter. Anyone who has turned pages for a pianist will probably advise a composer that repeats are a bad idea for solo piano music. It's different in orchestral music. If a section to be repeated takes up, say, half a page on a player's part, it makes perfect sense to use repeat signs. It might even simplify the problem of page turns.

Of course I had the option of orchestrating the passage in question differently the second time around. But I chose to orchestrate it the same both times, and so repeat signs make sense. Going into the repeat, the first clarinet is playing this:

Hmm, that first diminuendo "hairpin"is a little too close to the eighth notes' shared beam. Another one of those boring details I have to work on. Anyway, a few measures back I put in a "1." to indicate that I intend the first clarinet to play this.

Maybe I should add another "1." right after the begin repeat sign, just to be absolutely clear. But this is what I have coming out of the repeat:

I might want to add a redundant sharp for the second clarinet's D-sharp, just in case the notation software neglects to put it in... or the conductor thinks I meant to have the second clarinet play D-natural.

So... for the first clarinet going through this section the second time, the piano marking might seem redundant. But we expect our second clarinet to play that D-sharp leading to E-natural and then not play the E-natural when we go back to the beginning of the repeated section? Wait a minute: this is a lot like the toy example for the oboes, but transposed!

Writing out a repeated section just because of this little detail seems overkill to me. I think what I'm gong to do, unless I get better advice, is to add "a 2 la seconda volta" at the beginning of the repeated section.

It's certainly possible to bypass these problems by giving separate staves to each and every one of the wind instruments. I've seen at the Detroit Public Library a score of Basile Kalinnikov's Symphony No. 1 in G minor that does precisely that.

The problem with that approach is that, unless you're Leonard Bernstein, it becomes a little difficult to quickly ascertain which instrument is playing a certain line. It would be completely understandable if the conductor confused a second oboe for a first clarinet. I know that sort of thing would happen to me if I was on the podium.

There are no shortcuts here. As a composer or arranger, I must put myself in the shoes of the conductor and the players, and do everything I can to clearly communicate details such as these, not leave them to the musicians to figure out at rehearsal.

Losing sound on my computer

Every few months, when I start my computer and try to have iTunes play some music, there is no sound at all, apparently for no good reason. It happened to me again last week. What a first world problem, right?

Still, I figure I better write down what I did this time so that the next time it happens, I'm able to get my sound back up as quickly and smoothly as possible.

The very first thing I did was go into services.msc, stop the Windows Audio service, then restart it. No effect. Then I putzed around with Sound in the Control Panel with no results.

Then I uninstalled the first audio device (I left the headphone jack device alone, no headphones plugged in anyway).

After a restart, the speaker icon in the taskbar's notification area showed a bright red X. Also, no Internet connection, but that's a problem I can almost always resolve very quickly. Windows started the audio problems wizard, but even as that seemed to go nowhere, the speaker icon got back to its normal appearance.

So I went in the Sound section of the Control Panel to test some system sounds, like Asterisk and Calendar Reminder, and lo and behold: sound!

This means that the next time I have this problem, I should go straight to the Sound section of the Control Panel? Maybe, I'm not sure. It would be fine by me if I never have this particular problem again.

Meet the Press changes Data Download segment music

At some point after Chuck Todd took over Meet the Press on NBC, the show added a “Data Download” segment, in which Chuck Todd would go over some numbers, usually from recent polls and past elections, as some music would play in the background.

That music was... I don’t want to say corny or sentimental, I guess it was meant to present an inspiring, uplifting mood for the segment. It was all wrong for the segment, in my opinion.

Well, last week, they changed it. Now it’s got percussion and it gives the impression of something mechanical, like perhaps some supercomputer crunching a bunch of numbers.

And it’s also a little bit distracting, like they’re saying it’s boring to hear Todd spout numbers, so we gotta spice things up with some zippy music. But I’m not telling NBC to throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet.

Todd was off today, so Andrea Mitchell hosted the show today. The new “Data Download” segment music actually complemented Mitchell’s higher-pitched voice, rather than competed for attention against Todd’s voice.

For next week, when Todd returns, I suggest the music department add some subtle high pitched sounds to the “Data Download” segment music, like perhaps some celesta notes. And maybe dial down the guitars.

This is cross-posted on Daily Kos (with some political commentary added there).

The precipitato passage in Clara Schumann's Scherzo in D minor

I have made some very good progress on my orchestration of Clara Schumann's Scherzo in D minor, Opus 10. From the very beginning I thought I would have to make adjustments to the coda, perhaps almost crossing the line into free composition, in order to make it more orchestral rather than pianistic.

After all, simply transferring the final chord, seven notes, most of them below middle C, from the piano to the low instruments of the orchestra just seems kind of lazy. But the precipitato passage quoted above, very shortly before the final chord, also presented problems.

I decided I had to keep it in the orchestration. My first instinct, rather than just assign it all to the harp, was to have several instruments sustain notes of the passage after staggered entries. Instead, I just split it up between the flutes, clarinets and bassoons.

It sounded good in the computer playback, except it seemed way too fast. I've never been one to put too much stock in computer playback when it comes to orchestral balance (it is a very poor indication of how actual instruments will actually balance).

Tempo is a different matter. If it sounds too rushed in the computer playback, it will either sound rushed in actual performance or the musicians might play it in an uncomfortable manner. So that's something an arranger needs to do something about.

Maybe it needs more notes at the beginning of the passage, to ease into it. I tried a few variations of that idea. They all sounded even worse. It wasn't until yesterday that I hit upon the solution: it needs more notes at the end.

Specifically, one long note at the end. Bassoons and cellos hold on to that low D for the rest of the measure and a little bit into the next measure. That way the listener can perceive that a fall has occurred before moving on to the next musical event.

I might still tweak that, but that's the basic idea I'm going with for that passage.

The solution to the iTunes play count problem, at least for my situation

After almost a month of using VBScript to update play counts on iTunes 12.7 on my Windows 8 computer, I decided to Google it again, see if maybe anyone else had come up with a solution.

Indeed someone did: responding to "bobmel1," "rcannon3" says:

I too was having this issue, I fixed mine by signing out of iTunes and back in, now it's working again.

I looked on iTunes and saw that was I signed. I did Account > Sign Out, didn't sign back in, and now, voilà! Problem fixed.

I play a track, then iTunes updates the play count, and it also updates accordingly the various Smart Playlists I have which use either play count or last played date, or both. It's good to have things back to normal.

Rehearsal marks: The I or J quandary and its solution in Finale

Is this something I learned long ago, forgot and then rediscovered? Or am I learning it today for the first time?

Very early on, many years ago, I noticed that orchestral scores would usually skip either the letter I or the letter J. This makes sense, since in most fonts those two letters look almost the same. If the conductor asks the orchestra to resume playing from letter I but one or more musicians start from letter J, or vice-versa, that defeats the whole point of rehearsal letters.

I use Finale, the music notation program now owned and developed by Make Music, Inc. Since at least Finale 2010, the program comes with automatically sequenced rehearsal letters. It's a great convenience.

For instance, if a conductor tells me that my composition or arrangement has the rehearsal letters spaced too far apart, I can just pull up the score and just tell Finale where I want to add rehearsal letters, and the program takes care of changing all subsequent rehearsal letters accordingly, e.g., if I put in a new rehearsal letter between C and D, Finale changes the former D to E, the former E to F, etc.

But what about skipping I or J? In the past, what I have almost always done is try to place one or both of them at the start or the end of a fully scored passage, then hiding one of them (the keyboard shortcut on the Windows version is Ctrl-Shift-Alt-H). The rehearsal letter will still show on your computer screen, though faintly, but it will not print in the score nor the parts.

The reason to seek a fully scored passage for this kludge is that rehearsal letters, hidden or not, break multi-measure rests. It might look strange on a player's part to have a 3-measure rest starting at letter H, followed by a 5-measure rest ending at letter J, even though it would make much more sense to just have an 8-measure rest.

Occasionally, I would still do this even if the timpani were left out of an otherwise fully scored passage, figuring that timpanists are so used to counting consecutive multi-measure rests that an oddly split rest would not bother them in the least.

A better option is to put I or J at the beginning or end of a repeated section, but this of course supposes the particular piece of music has repeated sections and one of those repeated sections has an ending or beginning at about the middle.

Since the repeat sign is a better visual indicator of location than a rehearsal letter, and since it breaks multi-measure rests regardless, a rehearsal letter is useless, except as a hidden letter.

Sometimes, though, neither of these options are available, such as if the piece has no repeats and is thinly scored in the middle. Then you can't really have a hidden rehearsal letter, because a lot of player's parts are going to have oddly split multi-measure rests. Every rehearsal letter has to be musically meaningful and necessary.

Which brings me to what I've just learned today, or perhaps learned, forgot and rediscovered today: you can simply reset the sequence. With the Expression tool selected, click on the letter I that you want to change to J, or the J that you want to change to K.

Then right-click (or Control-click on Mac) on it to bring up a contextual menu, from which you select Edit Rehearsal Mark Sequence... to bring up this dialog box:

The default is Continue sequence, so just change it to Restart sequence at: and type in J or K or whichever letter (or double letter) you want to continue at. It's that simple.

I don't blog about composing and arranging as much as I would like. It takes up time that I would rather be spending on composing and arranging. But with this particular topic, given that it's something I could forget and have to relearn in the future, I figured I had to take the time to write something about it and publish it on my blog.

iTunes play count problem

It's not the biggest problem I'm facing, by far, even if we limit the scope to problems relating to music, but it's pretty damn annoying: iTunes 12.7 on my computer has suddenly stopped updating play counts and last played dates.

I was listening to Bruckner's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, complete with finale reconstruction by William Carragan, when I decided to convert some other tracks to AAC to send to someone. Normally, I pause playback before asking iTunes to convert anything. This time I didn't.

Maybe that's what messed up the play count logging feature, I'm not sure. iTunes logged that I listened to the first two tracks of the album last night, but not the last two tracks, even though I listened to each of them all the way through to the end and had iTunes repeat the last couple of minutes of each of those tracks.

All the tracks played alright, but the last two tracks that I definitely listened to last night were supposedly last played back in February. I tried playing some shorter tracks (three to four minutes each), beginning to end, over and over again, but iTunes also refused to update either their play counts or their last played dates.

I have quite a few Smart Playlists which depend on play counts or last played dates. It's a feature I find very useful. For example, a couple of my Smart Playlists are for tracks with zero play count, so that tells me which new (or newly imported) tracks I haven't listened to yet.

Like most people, I have a few favorite tracks (or "songs") that I listen to on a fairly regular basis. Those are on the Top 25 Most Played list, a playlist which I believe iTunes comes with by default.

But I also like to be reminded of a track I haven't listened to in months, so I made playlists for that. Then I listen to those tracks and some of them become new favorites of mine, others I might decide to delete. Most of them, though, I listen to once, they come off the playlist, and then a few months later they get on the playlist again.

I'm still running Windows 8. I've never liked Windows Media Player all that much. iTunes  has always made sense to me. So after I bought my current computer and hooked it up to the Internet a few years ago, one of the first things I did was download and install the current version of iTunes for Windows.

However, I've been annoyed at how frequently the program asks to update itself. Though it's not nearly as annoying as with Adobe Flash Player, which seems to want to update itself every damn week, it seems.

Don't ask me at what point I upgraded to iTunes 12.4, I don't remember. Aside from a few minor occasional annoyances with the Play Next feature, I was pretty happy with it. So when iTunes kept bugging me about versions 12.5 and 12.6, I declined.

Then, the notification for version 12.7 came to me at a convenient time last week, so I decided, what the hell, might as well upgrade. The interface was noticeably different, but for the way that I use iTunes, it was the same old program that I have enjoyed for all these years now.

All my playlists that depend on play counts or last played dates were working normally. Then, on September 19, 2017, at night, suddenly play counts and last played dates stopped updating.

Apparently this is a problem lots of other people have had at various times throughout the history of iTunes. This is the first time I'm experiencing it. Some have reported that turning off crossfading fixes it. I don't have crossfading on, but I thought I would try turning it on and then turning it back off. It made no difference.

I'm willing to try just about anything, provided it's not too drastic. Downgrading to an earlier version of iTunes? Maybe. Deleting and re-importing my entire iTunes library? Hell no.

Those of you who've also had this problem with iTunes 12.7, please let me know what you've tried and if it has worked for you.