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I've been looking at orchestral scores on Amazon, and one review of a score of one of Dvorak's symphonies remarked that it had no instrument markings.
As most scores don't have previews, and supposing the edition is not on IMSLP, or it has no instrument markings, is there any way to know?

asdf wrote:I've been looking at orchestral scores on Amazon, and one review of a score of one of Dvorak's symphonies remarked that it had no instrument markings.
As most scores don't have previews, and supposing the edition is not on IMSLP, or it has no instrument markings, is there any way to know?

If you can't inspect a score before buying, look for the 'urtext' label on the cover. Here's one:



An urtext edition is intended to reproduce the original intention of the composer as exactly as possible, without any added or changed material. Which should increase the chances of instrument markings being present.

If the 'urtext' label isn't there, an editor may have wrecked the score, i.e. removed material the composer wrote and introduced material the composer didn't write.

Thank you for the advice; I'll be watching out for urtext scores (or ones already on IMSLP).

I was a little puzzled by the term "instrument markings" so I looked up Dvorak symphony scores in Amazon Books and found in a review for a Dover reprint of Dvorak 8 and 9 a review by a "Mr.Moose" that contains the following:

There is one significant problem, though. I bought the score so that I could use it for study, arranging, and conducting. Except for the beginning page of each movement, there are no instrument markings on the staff. What a waste! Unless you're the type of person who can look at a score and hear music, the score becomes close to useless for anything other than collecting or following a recording.

If you're conducting you don't have a precise idea of who to direct a cue to. If you're arranging or studying the score you have to look over at the key signature to guess what key that player is coming from. Even then, you still don't know exactly what instrument it is that you are writing or studying without a recording.

It is clear from this that "instrument markings" means the labels at the left of each page for which instrument is playing on which staff. The scores Dover used for its reprint are here at IMSLP too (Novello for the 8th, http://imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/e ... .8_-_1.pdf and Simrock for the 9th, http://216.129.110.22/files/imglnks/usi ... e_Nr.9.pdf ) and they both, aside from the first page of every movement, lack instrument labels.

But in decades of score reading this is the first time I've ever found anybody confused by this characteristic, which is typical of very many scores from be beginning of score notation up to the present day. Dover didn't deliberately remove the instrument indcations or forget to put them in -- they were never there in the original scores to begin with. Simply having an urtext edition is no guarantee that instrument labels will be present on every page. Not even composer autograph manuscripts are completely labeled. Neither is there an urtext edition of every piece one might be interested in, nor are all urtexts available or even legal to have at IMSLP. So I'm afraid that you're just going to have to get used to it, like generations of previous musicians who have successfully used precisely the same scores.

A score laid out in this fashion usually has the saving grace of a STANDARDIZED layout of the instruments, as depicted on the first page of every movement. Once that is set, it is easy to figure out on subsequent pages of that movement which instrument is playing what. This layout is even pretty much standardized between movements and between pieces from different composers so often you don't even need to see the first page of a movement to know what instrument is playing.

For orchestral scores published from around the time of Beethoven to the present day, from the top downward the instruments are consistently grouped by woodwinds, brass, percussion and strings. Within each group the order is on the whole from higher to lower instruments. So in the woodwinds from the top down you find Flutes, Oboes, Clarinets and Bassoons. For the brass the order is French Horns, Trumpets, Trombone, Tubas. And the strings are always 1st Violins, 2nd Violins, Violas, Cellos and Double Basses. If there are auxiliary instruments (like piccolos or bass clarinets) they usually go either above or below their respective main category, depending on the relative pitch level (piccolos above the flutes, bass clarinets below clarinets but above bassoons). If this layout changes from one page to the next, the publisher usually will label the instruments that are added in on the page where they enter but will give no indications for instruments that have dropped out (but this should be clear by context or by a process of elimination and in any case is far less important than when a instrument enters). If the piece is a concerto, the soloist, regardless of the instrument, is normally placed right above the strings.

As I see it, the big problem with most orchestral scores (including most urtext editions such as the New Mozart Edition available online and especially the Schott's Wagner edition) is not of instrument labels but that of transposing instruments, where the instrument is notated at a different pitch than the sound it produces.I'm surprised that Mr.Moose didn't complain about this too, as it is a more significant factor than instrument labels.

Regular flutes, oboes, bassoons, most trombones and all the strings all sound as notated (the double basses an octave lower), thank goodness. But if the instrument isn't itself "in C" (such as Clarinets in B-flat or A, or French Horns in F) the notated pitch is not the sounding pitch and you're going to have to figure out by mental transposition what the sounding pitch is. In fact, when a score is notated entirely "in C," such as those by Prokofiev, the publisher will often specifically call this to the reader's attention, so that you don't start doing mental transpositions when you don't have to. Transposing notation is the single greatest barrier to the fluent reading of a full score and has been a bete noir of many a conducting student (including yours truly). It is also unfortunately a long-standing music publishing "tradition" that has outlived by a couple of centuries its usefulness, which was limited even at the outset. IMSLP should ban all user-typeset scores that continue it and, to return to the original point, should additionally insist that all new typesets have all instrument labels.

--Sixtus

Dover Dvorak score: http://www.amazon.com/Antonin-Dvorak-SY ... 289&sr=1-1
Review of above score by "Mr.Moose": http://www.amazon.com/Antonin-Dvorak-SY ... Descending

Um....why shouldn't the transposing instruments be noted as written in their parts? It seems to me that a conductor could communicate with the player much more easily by knowing what the playing is seeing rather than having to do a mental transposition.

There was a mid-century vogue (20C, that is) in having full scores notated in suoni reali (excepting some 8va 8vb 15va 15vb instruments). In some cases it’s welcome: the Méhul/Berlioz school of writing for the full chromatic palette on four horns each in a different transposition is murder to read. Elsewhere, it’s a crutch for the conductor IMHO.

The main issue I’ve personally had is with student or amateur players who can’t play the (now unusual) transpositions that have gone out of fashion since 1900, and have to have them spelled out in the familiar modern keys: even when earlier music, especially for brass, is almost entirely based on the natural hamonic series and predictable as clockwork. (Fair enough if the problem relates to needing a second instrument, which is expensive, especially for student orchestras.)

One thing the conductor or score-reader should do if s/he is really put out by lack of instrument markings: GET A PENCIL AND ADD THEM IN!

My 2¢… PML

Melodia wrote:Um....why shouldn't the transposing instruments be noted as written in their parts? It seems to me that a conductor could communicate with the player much more easily by knowing what the playing is seeing rather than having to do a mental transposition.

Because a conductor should be concerned with how the whole thing is supposed to sound, and that is far easier to see (and mentally hear) if the full score is non-transposing. I also believe that the parts should also be non-transposing.

The whole transposing situation was only really relevant in the early days of orchestral wind instruments, before they became highly mechanized in the early 19th century, when many of the WW instruments had the same or very similar fingerings but the instruments themselves were at different pitch levels. For brass instruments, the lip-tension and other embouchure requirements are approximately the same for any given pitch, regardless of a note's position in a harmonic series. So transposed notation didn't make sense for the brass even when the instruments were all valveless.

Imagine the score-reading chaos if the entire string section were given different scordatura tunings (as in the Biber Rosary Sonatas), a situation analogous to transposing WW and brass parts. Even one scordatura string line, such as the violino piccolo in Brandenburg 1 or Mahler 4 2nd movement, is enough to confuse, and these are merely transpositions.

--Sixtus