In the age of the algorithm, the playlist and the personalized Spotify chart (Spotify Wrapped), the musical object resists. The vinyl record continues to come back into vogue – its sales having increased by 22% in the United States for the first half of the year which is ending compared to the previous year. The compact disc and even the good old cassette are enjoying renewed interest. But what about the original physical medium, the musical score on paper? If electronic music publishing is slowly gaining followers, paper still has a bright future ahead of it. A look behind the scenes of music paper.
On this Wednesday afternoon in December, the instruments of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra resonate in a Maison symphonique with empty seats. In the center of the stage, maestro Kent Nagano discusses with the violinists: it’s rehearsal day for Polichignon’s secretthe Christmas story played by Fred Pellerin, which premiered the next day.
Michel Léonard, music librarian of the orchestra, returns backstage after having distributed all his scores, on paper, to the musicians. All prepared by him: the page turners adapted to the type of instrument played, the staves printed by his assistants and him in the music library, located on the top floor of the Maison symphonique. Printed on sheets measuring 9.5 inches by 12.5 inches in thick, beige paper “so that the light in the room does not reflect too much on the lectern,” specifies the music librarian.
“The majority of musicians still use the paper score,” confirms Mathieu Harel, bassoonist with the OSM for 25 years. However, on the day of our visit, on the garden side, a harpist was following the note on the oversized screen of his iPad Pro. A self-confessed technophobe, Harel refuses, but admits that if he had started in the profession younger, “probably I would have been curious to try it. But I would always be afraid that the tablet would run out of battery, or that the screen would freeze, that the page wouldn’t turn. Besides, I never bring my cell phone on stage; even closed, I’m afraid it will start ringing in the middle of a concert! »
During the pandemic, noted the bassoonist, “more and more musicians in the orchestra started using electronic tablets rather than paper scores.” Access to the music library was then restricted. The distancing imposed even on stage prevented the violinists from sitting two per desk. Michel Léonard then distributed his scores in digital format. Today, “musicians can ask me for a digital score to practice, but all the scores are printed to be placed on the lectern during the concert,” specifies the music librarian. The pandemic has had its day and good old habits have returned, including reading notes on paper.
Archives and Photoshop
On the top floor of the Maison symphonique, Michel Léonard, member of the Major Orchestra Librarians’ Association (its annual conference brings together colleagues and major score publishers) welcomes us: in the vestibule, we can see the lockers in which the score books are placed for each instrumentalist, according to their category (winds, brass, strings, percussion, etc.). The door on the left leads to the reprography workshop; further on, the office where Léonard and his assistants “clean” the scores using the image editing software Photoshop: after a while, explains the music librarian, an archived score gets damaged, “from especially since at the time, there was a lot of acidity in the paper, so the old scores disintegrate in their envelope.
In addition, the musicians and the conductor annotate the scores with a lead pencil, for example by marking more complicated passages or indicating the bowing strokes (all together, the gesture from above or below) in notebooks for violinists. Cleaning then begins with a photocopy, then edited on the computer, which will finally be reprinted.
All old scores will be archived. “I refuse to destroy orchestral equipment,” says Michel Léonard. And it is out of the question that I repeat, say, the score of the 1D Symphony by Beethoven used by Kent Nagano and annotated by him, then I asked Rafael Payare to use it in turn. The indications recorded by Kent are his own; I don’t want them to be erased, but I don’t want them to be imposed on Rafael” who, in turn, will leave his notes so that the orchestra’s interpretation bears his signature and passes to posterity.
Because for musicologists, the OSM archives contain treasures of information scribbled on paper scores yellowed by time, like this precious manuscript of the work And I will see this strange city again written by its composer Claude Vivier, and of which Leonardo made the first engraving which was used for the first “commercial” edition of the work, first published in 1994 by Doberman-Yppan. Or this magnificent manuscript of a work by Pierre Mercure in which the composer used a color system to illustrate the intensity of the passages — the manuscript is even dedicated to the famous maestro Zubin Mehta, who conducted the OSM from 1961 to 1967 .
The paper that protects rights
If the music librarian does not print the scores himself, the musicians then work with the score books archived in the vault of the Maison symphonique – there are more than 4,000 of them – or with those rented to the orchestra by the publisher of the work on the program, when it has not yet fallen into the public domain, that is to say when the composer is still alive, or died less than 70 years ago. Once the work is performed, the notebooks will be returned to the publisher, ready to be rented by another orchestra.
The Canadian Music Center (CMC), whose offices in Quebec are located on Crescent Street in downtown Montreal, acts a bit like a publisher in the sense that it prints scores for orchestras with works by a Canadian composer registered with the CMC in the program and receives royalties for his performance in front of an audience, sums which he redistributes to the rights holders.
The vast majority of scores rented by the CMC are published in paper format, confirms Félix-Antoine Hamel, responsible for sales and rentals of scores at the reprography workshop: “It’s less complicated that way; Preparing score books in digital format requires more work, and it is necessary to add a digital protection system to prevent the score from being modified or made too many copies. It is important to be able to ensure that the composer receives all his royalties. »
As does the OSM’s music librarian, Félix-Antoine Hamel (also a jazz saxophonist) cleans damaged scores and prepares score books ordered by orchestras, here and around the world. Sheets of music paper are stacked on the counter in his workshop. He had just bound three copies of a work by the young and brilliant Montreal composer Nicole Lizée. The neighboring pile is made up of old, crumbling pages, stained with eighth notes, half notes and trills, which will be digitized and added to the CMC music library (open to the public), which has more than 25,000 scores. Only a minority of his works have been digitized; Most of this treasure of local music is carefully preserved in the basement.
Trained in classical guitar, Émilie Bédard works in the workshop of the Canadian Music Center while continuing her studies in composition at the University of Montreal in classical guitar. Born in the Web era, she nevertheless prefers paper to PDF “so as not to tire my eyes, firstly, but I have gotten used to working with paper scores. It looks like a score on the computer screen, it’s less true.” Yes, music paper still has a bright future ahead of it.