If you have ever seen a conductor score you know that it looks extremely complex. For a lot of musicians, you simply have one staff of notes to deal with in a piece. As a pianist you have two staffs of music (generally bass and treble) and an organ might have three (bass, treble, and foot pedals). A conductor score is filled with every part – strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion; if it’s a part of the composition, it’s in there!
The string players will double the parts, so you have a number of first violins playing one part and second violins playing another part, and then there are the cellos, violas, and basses playing their parts (and often doubling, tripling, or even more).
The woodwinds and brass generally have their own parts – so the conductor score is often filled from top to bottom with musical staves!
The question is, how do you make sense out of all of this? Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s actually quite a bit more complex than that!
A conductor score has more than just treble and bass clefs – viola has its own clef, there are C clefs which can occur on different lines (and they often change within the piece), and the same thing can be true for other instruments as well. And to make matters even more complex, many of the instruments are not pitched in C – they are transposing instruments. A great example of this is a clarinet or trumpet (which are usually pitched in B flat) or a French horn which can be pitched in nearly any key, often changing keys for each movement of a work!
So this means when a conductor sees a C written for a French horn in F, he needs to know that the absolute pitch is actually an F. In other words, a conductor has the incredibly tough job of transposing music instantly – all the different clefs and keys – and make sense of it.
How is this even possible?
I’ve seen a number of conductors who can look at a score, reduce it down to the piano at sight, and see the absolute pitch of all the parts of the score instantly. They usually become very adept at fixed-do solfeggio so they know absolute pitch on a score and they are able to communicate with the rest of the orchestra. This way they can tell each of the instruments which notes to play and understand when there are wrong notes.
To get fluid with this you will really need to become comfortable with all your clefs and transpositions; this can take years to master.
But for most people, you can approach it like this. If you look at a conductor score you can understand that the string parts are going to be in C, and if you have other instruments they may transpose. This way you can get a general sense of the score without necessarily absorbing all the details.
I strongly recommend familiarizing yourself with the score of the piece you are playing; whether they are orchestral works you are playing a part in, chamber music, or pieces with piano. Knowing what is going on with other instruments is essential to be able to play your part in context.
Thanks for joining me Robert Estrin: Robert@LivingPianos.com (949) 244-3729