Music Braille_Identifying Music Format

[Mary Mosley]

We have come across an unfamiliar style of music.  We are hoping you an identify what the author intended in the writing of the music.

At first glance it appears to be an instrumental ensemble inside a bar-over-bar piano format.   The score shows a standard choral ensemble with a piano accompaniment.  However within the clearly identified piano accompaniment are the abbreviations for other instruments such as woodwinds, horns, violins and trombones.  Sometimes where these instrument identifiers appear the music parts are clearly divided and in other parts when it say trombones it shows a chord with two notes.  In some instances it shows two instruments such as strings with woodwinds and it shows a chord with four notes.   All of this as the instruments keep switching back and forth.  It all seems a bit chaotic.

Is this transcribed as bar-over-bar with instrument identifiers in the music lines like expressions or is it transcribed as an instrumental ensemble and if so where is the piano in all of this?  Any advice would be most helpful.  We have sent you an attachment.

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[Kathleen]

Hi there,

This is what is called an orchestral reduction. It is intended for the piano to play, but it is a reduced version of a composition originally scored for orchestra. The identifiers are telling the musicians which instruments would have played it in the orchestral version.

Section 29.9 of MBC 2015 talks about orchestral reductions in piano music. Transcribe this in piano bar-over-bar format. Treat the instrument abbreviations as word-sign expressions and include them in the music where they appear in print. The notes printed in small type can be shown in in-accords using the small type indicator - dots 6, 26 (doubled by repeating the second cell before the first instance and using the 2-cell symbol before the final instance).

Hope that helps!

Kathleen

[Author]

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