What is the point of cutaway scores?

[Dave2002]

Clearly it's helpful to have reduced size scores in which staves which are not being used "on the current page" are omitted, thus also permitting the possibility of multiple systems per page, and producing more compact documents.

What, however, is the point of cutaway scores - in which even empty bars are not displayed? I suppose one could put poems or illustrations in the gaps - political cartoons perhaps.

I gather that there are parts of the music publication/use industry which use such cutaway scores - so I'm curious to know more about those.

[smittims]

I believe one way they began was the use of a stave-wheel or raster to draw the stave on blank paper. Stravinsky used this in his later music, drawing a stave only where there were notes to put in, and I think one of the first works to be printed in this way was his lovely little set of 'Orchestra Variations: Aldous Huxley in Memoriam', long available as a Hawkes Pocket Score, though at a price which made it , price per page, one of the most expensive books ever!

Since then of course all sorts of different ways of printing scores have come up. I was once very interested in a composer now probably forgotten: Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, who was active 50-60 years ago , and who experimented with some unusual methods of notation,which unfortunately had to be exlpained in detail to the musician or reader.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

This is all new to me. I have never seen what is being described.

However, in many modern full scores, there does appear to be a "laziness" involved in that all instrumental lines are printed, even through several pages of rests. Then, to compound the issue, the stave sizes are often so small in a full score that the notes are actually smaller than those in an older miniature score. Yet often the white space between the staves can be far bigger than it needs to be. With computerised layouts, it's easy to score at A3 size, and forget that the publisher might reduce it photographically to B4. It would be far better if the originator did this, enlarging the stave size, before making the necessary compensations. The most recent Elgar Complete Edition volume (The Black Knight/Banner of St George) is a case in point.

[RichardB]

I was once very interested in a composer now probably forgotten: Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, who was active 50-60 years ago , and who experimented with some unusual methods of notation,which unfortunately had to be exlpained in detail to the musician or reader.

A CD of chamber music by Haubenstock-Ramati was released in 2016 on the Kairos label, performed by Klangform Wien, so his music is not quite forgotten. I wonder why you say it's "unfortunate" that his unusual notations had to be explained to the performer or reader - as I expect you know, the point was that the "graphic notations" were intended to be used not so much as instructions for sounds to be realised by musicians but as stimuli to their imagination, so that every interpretation would be different. (The Klangforum disc contains three quite different versions of the piece Konstellationen.)

I think you're right that Stravinsky was one of the first composers to produce scores where staves were only present when the instrument or voice in question is active, although I can think of examples in the scores of Stockhausen, Kagel, Berio, Penderecki and Lutoslawski as well, and it was a fairly common practice in music of the late 1950s and 1960s. The point was probably connected with the fact that, at that time, many composers (including Stravinsky of course) were writing scores where textures would change much more often than was usual in older music, with instruments singly or in groups entering and leaving quite frequently, so that presenting the score in this "skeletal" way made it easier to see at a glance what was playing and when. The graphic design of such scores was thus to a great extent an expression of their musical style.

On the other hand, it's one of the many things that standard notation software like Finale or Sibelius makes quite difficult, and (certainly in Sibelius) prone to unwanted artefacts.

[RichardB]

This is all new to me. I have never seen what is being described.

Have you never looked at a late Stravinsky score???

[smittims]

Thanks for the info about the Haubenstock-Ramati CD, Richard.

By 'unfortunate' I was thinking of passage in the score of his opera 'Amerika' where he sort of 'paints' a shape on the page that looks like a Henry Moore sculpture, and the part-writer or musicians, have to work out how to play it, which makes it puzzling, ratherthan presenting the clarity many musicians woudl expect from a score. But that may have been his intention, to make the conductor or players think creatively.

[RichardB]

that may have been his intention, to make the conductor or players think creatively.

Of course it was! But it's a problematic area. On the one hand no score is ever able or intended to give exhaustive information about the music to be played - this is clear, among other things, from arguments about HIPP and so forth - since scores are always embedded in some specific cultural context, provided by a combination of a musician's actual environment and experience, the contents of the score, and whatever explanatory apparatus is added to it, whether within the score or in the form of some kind of manual of technique. And H-R's scores are no exception. Usually they're made up of bits and pieces of notational symbols placed as it were out of context, which gives a clue as to how to approach them. Personally I don't find this kind of approach very attractive either as a composer or as a performer. As a listener I sometimes find the results interesting, but when that's the case it often turns out that the performers have put at least as much creative work into the music as the composer did!

[smittims]

Yes, I expect copying out the string parts would be a challenge, in the passage I was thinking of. But it was written for the Deutsche Oper Berlin so I suppose they managed it somehow .

[Dave2002]

I wasn't thinking of anything quite as visual as this when I started the thread.

[smittims]

Thanks, Dave. I enjoyed that. There are a few pieces by old H-R on youtube, which I will investigate when I've caught up with my Bernard van Dieren listening..

[Dave2002]

Unfortunately I don't know which of Stravinsky's scores - if any - make use of cutaway notation, and copyright restrictions mean that I can't acceess any easily from libraries such as IMSLP.

I recently saw a score which had been engraved using a lot of cutaway staves - and I'm gradually warming to the idea. It's not going to "save the planet" in terms of ink which is not needed, though.

If anyone has suggestions for accessible scores which exploit cutaways, I'd be glad to know of them - or even just image files showing one or two pages.

[RichardB]

Unfortunately I don't know which of Stravinsky's scores - if any

What do you mean, "if any"? Both smittims and I have mentioned that Stravinsky used this kind of score layout. If you don't believe us and wish to find out for yourself, why don't you try searching for score-following videos of late Stravinsky pieces?

[Dave2002]

OK - here is one of Stravinsky's - from 1962.

Is it possible to identify when he started using this style? [ OK - obviously it is - but has anyone already done it? If so, what's the answer? ]

[Dave2002]

Here is another one:

[smittims]

Stravinsky was using his wheel as early as 1912 when sketching 'Le Sacre' but his scores as late as 'Threni' , 1959 , were printed conventionally. 'Movements' may have been the first to be published in 'cutaway' format.