When you
meet someone for the first time, what do you notice about his/her attire? Does
he look comfortable? Professional? Do her clothes fit well, or are they too loose?
Do the clothes’ colors stand out in a crowd, or fade into the surroundings? Are
you too distracted by his attire that you can’t be completely focused on his personality?
We are constantly sizing up people when we first meet them, collecting
information on how they wish to present themselves to the world. And others are
doing the same to us.
The same
is true about music scores. Recently, one of my graduate composition students
showed me the score of a student composer from another university. The notation
was akin to a poorly dressed man whose clothes are rumpled, oversized, and spotted
with coffee stains. Notation errors abounded everywhere – a large number of musical
notes and elements were colliding into each other, symbols were used
incorrectly, and the document was poorly spaced. Talk about a poor first
impression! I mentioned to my graduate student that given the lack of attention
to notation, this undergraduate has some work to do on the score before sending
it out to people. My student replied that a graduate student had written the
piece. (Oops.)
None
of us knows whose hands our scores will reach. The student of the poorly
notated score might be chagrined to learn that a professor at another
university had seen it. If I hadn’t been so distracted by the notation and instead
impressed by the music, this piece could have become something I would
potentially champion. What if I had been in a position to
program this piece at a performance venue?
What if I was so struck by the music that I wanted to hand it to professional
performers who might share my enthusiasm for it?
Making
sure that the scores you create are carefully and cleanly notated should be the
standard for all of us, students and professionals alike. Even the first copy
you give out to your performers should be clean. The graduate student might
have had a beautiful piece buried somewhere in the rubble of that score, but if the composer couldn’t take his music seriously enough to present it clearly, then neither
should I.
As
legendary fashion designer Coco Chanel once said, “Dress
shabbily, they notice the dress. Dress impeccably, they notice the woman.”
