When I was at the Orange County American Guild of Organists convention, I was intrigued by how my former student Joey Fala had pasted his copies of music into a large artist’s sketch pad. It was then possible to perform the entire concert without a page turner. By reducing the size of the music slightly, he could look at many more pages at one time, reducing the number of page turns. He could also paste the pages in a layout where page turns could be done where there might be a hand free.
I did something similar when I played the Bach Clavierübung concert, but instead of pasting the pages into a large book, I used poster board.
The problem with this method is the sizes of the poster board were not consistent, but dependent on the length of the piece. It meant that I had to carry around a cumbersome bunch of large and varying sizes of poster board for practicing and to the concert. Also the notes on the page were minuscule, to say the least, but that’s not a problem. Hey, remember that I used to perform from miniature scores, and especially since I had cataract surgery, I can read 4 point type!
By putting all of my concert music in a book such as this, I accomplished several goals:
- I reduced the number of pages from 91 to 45.
2. I eliminated several bad page turns.
3. The entire book is much lighter than the three-ring notebook I was using to store all the music.
Lighter weight will be important since I’ll be taking it on my next trip and will be restricting my baggage to a single carry-on plus a small backpack. My return flights will be a living nightmare in that I am coming back from Kristiansand, Norway via Oslo, London, Copenhagen, Los Angeles and finally Honolulu on FIVE (5, count ’em!) different airlines! [What crazy booked those flights, hoping to save a few $$!]
That’s still a whole lotta notes, though!
While I am glad that the musical scores are a lot more manageable, while I was cutting and pasting all that music, this is what I wished I were doing:
Yes! As a child of the 50s, who else remembers cutting out and playing with paper dolls!
I’m scanning almost everything and then repasting it with Photoshop into PDFs for my iPad Pro (Schedule C deduction). Don’t have to lug around a whole bound volume for the one piece I play.
And those French publications I bought 40+ years ago? I’ve met tougher toilet paper!
I’m rather envious of all your travels, given my counterfeit body parts.
Yes, David, it would probably be simpler to store music on an iPad, but as someone recently told me, to perform early and baroque music on a 21st c. device just doesn’t jive; seems artificial, not authentic, and I may be old fashioned in that regard, but I prefer paper.
Interesting you’ll be in Kristiansand! That’s where my sister- and brother-in-law live. Kathryn and I will be there in early August for our niece’s wedding.
I won’t get there until the 11th. A former chorister lives there and has invited me.