Percussion notation in John Williams scores

[mavros 0]

Most signature Williams scores show two 5 line percussion staffs. Tuned and non pitched percussion instruments seem to be distributed over these two staffs without clear rules. Does anyone has more info about the philosophy of this choice of notation?

 

The two staffs definitely do not represent two players switching instruments. Also no logical player groups like e.g left and right side of the stage seem to fit. In some scores e.g  Star Wars Main Title, instruments like Piatti even move from Percussion 2 to Percussion 1 during the piece. 

 

I have copied a lot of Williams scores (in Dorico) from the John Williams signature series edited by H. Leonard to create mockups using virtual instruments and use separate staffs for each percussion instrument and only after finishing the complete piece combine them in a percussion kit as in the original score but it would be interesting to know why these combinations are chosen by J. Williams, his orchestrators, or the people who prepared the published scores.

 

 

[QuartalHarmony 645]

Some suggestions:

 

1) JW signs off the HL scores, so that’s how he wants them presented.

 

2) Compressing the percussion onto two staves saves space on the page, compared to having five or more staves. Parade of the Ewoks, for example, would need to be printed in a near-invisibly small font if it had fully independent percussion staves.
HL don’t seem to follow the rule of removing unused staves to save space when instruments drop out for a few pages, so each page always has every stave present. This might be done because it better reflects what JW uses on the scoring stage (judging by sheet music leaks) so it’s what he’s used to, thus explaining 1).

 

3) As for a consistent logic, does it matter if each change of instrument is clearly noted?

[mavros 0]

Thank you for the explanation. I agree that for a real orchestra the non standardized sometimes inconsistent percussion staff set up, in particular with one instrument being in both percussion staffs, does not matter much as each player will  have  an individual part score. Although I do wonder how such a score would look like if the same instrument is used in different  staffs. I only have the full conductor scores as the full version costs with the parts scores are very high for just making mockups. 

 

It is obvious that single staffs for all instruments would lead to space issues. 5 Line staffs can be used for many instruments without confusion however e.g. a drum kit might have 10 or more instruments on one staff. Two 5 line staffs is sufficient for the limited number of percussion instruments in the JW scores but breaking them up in a more standardized way (e.g. one drums/others and one cymbals/bells would be helpful. In most scores there would also be room for one or even two separate tuned percussion staffs.  In most cases one staff with changing instruments (often chimes and glockenspiel) would be sufficient although I did find scores where two tuned percussion instruments are playing and not in unison.

[karelm 3,013]

It's just combined staff like two horns on a single staff where they play different parts.  You should think of it as two sets of multiple players (or two stations with multiple instruments each), but each set might include multiple people if that makes sense.  For example, in this excerpt, the top staff requires three players (from top to bottom cymbal, triangle, and suspended cymbal) on a single staff and the grand staff starting at bar 75 changes the suspended cymbal to the glockenspiel.  Then there is separately a second part which can also have between one, two, or three players.  

 

 

Sometimes the players have to jump around (glock player in part 1 is also playing vibraphone in part 2 just as an example).  Think of it as percussion stations.  Each station has multiple instruments and multiple people but the total number of players might just be three or four.  There are lots of reasons for this, first the Hal Leonard scores want to be practical translations meant for rental and performance.  Having more than three percussionists usually means the orchestra has to hire another player for the entire program and rehearsals.  Orchestras tend to not like to do that as they don't have a lot of extra profit to spend so trying to manage the resources to get a good performance is what you are seeing here.  What usually happens is the players will take some liberties, but this is showing they are making effort to make this practical and require minimal running around and reasonable number of players to pull off in theory.

[QuartalHarmony 645]

As another example, flute staves will often say (to piccolo) to indicate that a player should change instrument. I suppose what’s described here is just a more extensive percussion version of the same thing.

[BSOinsider 45]

These are editorial choices made by Hal Leonard, and are related to how the parts are published. The Signature Edition HL scores have matching sets of individual orchestra parts which match the arrangement of instruments in the score. There will be no triangle-specific part, but instead a Percussion 1 part which will contain all of the same music as the Percussion 1 line in the full score.

 

What the editors at HL do is figure out a workable pattern of instrument changing and player moving for live performance. The live performance element is determining the percussion layout.