Paper engineering

For several weeks now, I’ve been working on preparing the scores for my next concert, March 21, 2022, Bach’s 337th birthday. I always seem to make things hard on myself, because I simply can’t buy the music from a music store or find the sheet music online—in many instances, I am pretty sure it’s just not available.

Huh? The music of Bach not available in printed sheet music form in this day and age of IMSLP?

For all you non-musicians out there, The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), also known as the Petrucci Music Library after publisher Ottaviano Petrucci, is a subscription-based digital library of public-domain music scores. It includes public domain and licensed recordings to allow for study by ear. The project, which uses MediaWiki software, has uploaded more than 495,000 scores and 59,000 recordings of more than 152,000 works by 18,000 composers. IMSLP has both an iOS app and an Android app. (Wikipedia)

What makes the March 21st concert different and challenging is that it is a concert which will feature the works of Bach for two organs in duet—music for one organ which I’m scoring for two, to take advantage of the two Beckerath organs at the Lutheran Church of Honolulu. It will be similar to our “Dueling Bach” concert of a couple of years ago except we will also add violin, oboe and trumpet obbligati to the works of Bach in addition to a couple of organ solos.

Here’s where the “paper engineering” comes in… in addition to transcribing the music for two organs, I create an edition for myself which as much as possible, tries to eliminate awkward page turns so I don’t need to rely on someone else to turn the pages.

In the case of the opening piece, the “Concerto in D minor for oboe and violin, BWV 1060R,” we are using the version as scored by Maurizio Machella and will perform the piece with a violin obbligato plus the two organs. Machella had already scored the piece for violin, oboe, strings, harpsichord and continuo organ, but there is only the full orchestral score available online, and no individual parts. I have had to “cut and paste” the violin and the continuo part. In the old days I would make a photocopy of the score and actually use scissors to cut out the part into many strips, pasting them on a piece of paper. Now I do it digitally, selecting and pasting from the PDF into a new document.

Next I purchase an 11″ x 14″ artists sketchpad to paste in the condensed parts for the whole concert, all in program order and voilà!