John Ruggero wrote:
The last two examples are simply the Durand house style for cues. I see a lot in favor of it actually and have considered using it in my own stuff.
You are of course free to do so, and I know a major London copy shop employs this style, but I would encourage you to speak to people who make their living reading new music with very little or no rehearsal for performance/recording, and see what they would like to have in the way of cues. I know of an instance appox. 15 years ago where this "Durand house style" for cues single-handedly brought a NY Phil rehearsal to a screeching halt, where a colleague of mine was then chewed out in front of the entire orchestra by both Kurt Masur and a Pulitzer prize winning composer, before Mr. Masur cancelled the rest of the rehearsal and ordered the cues corrected by the following day.
EDIT: I guess spoiler tagging isn't supported on this forum. OCTO, is that possible to add that feature? I'm sure most people aren't interested in this long-winded story and it has little to do with the original post in this thread.
Spoiler tagging very long story below.
[spoiler]
I've mentioned this job before here, but it still is probably the largest job I've ever worked on, and was the job where I really learned how to run a big project, and probably more importantly, how not to run a big project. A Pulitzer prize winning composer was commissioned to write a very ambitious work for the NY Phil plus two other ensembles. The work was 12 movements, approx. 2 hours long, and a chorus was involved in 6 of the movements. This composer is still incredibly busy, but also somewhat notoriously last-minute, and had delayed starting work to the point that Mr. Masur was ready to cancel the whole concert.
The composer had his own "project manager," and he hired a woman I still frequently work with to do the engraving from the composer's pencil scores. She is an excellent manager, incredibly well-organized, very experienced, and put together a team of around 20 copyists and proofreaders able to do the work as fast as the composer could get them to us. I was one of the lead copyists and I set up the template for the job. A job this size reasonably would need a minimum of 4 months prior to performance (and preferably 6) to get scores engraved, parts created, everything proofread by both in-house proofreaders and composer, in order to get parts to the orchestra librarian a month prior to the performance as they usually request. We didn't see a single note until 6 or 7 weeks before the performance.
Mr. Masur was furious at the tardiness of the manuscript and in order to save the concert a deal was struck: if we, the composer and copyists, could provide parts and scores to 6 movements by a certain date, he would allow the concert to go forward as planned, otherwise it would be called off. In order to make this insane deadline, we were essentially working around the clock, including weekends and over a holiday. As the copying bills started to come in, it soon became clear that the composer's project manager had not budgeted anywhere near enough to cover the copying costs for this project. (The final bill was 2.5x what was budgeted, and easily into 6 figures.) Now, the NY Phil is a union organization, but this was being billed through one of the other groups involved and they did not have a union copyist agreement, so the project manager decided in order to save money he would have us engrave the scores so they would be of acceptable quality to Mr. Masur, then he would send our files to a less expensive copy shop in London that he knew to have them extract parts. (This is in Finale prior to the linked parts feature.) We would have liked to have had full control of the parts as well, but as we had as much work as we could handle anyway, we were ok with it, even though we really didn't have a say in the matter.
Not to brag too much, but our team made the score deadline, and I'll humbly say our scores were visually quite excellent. Mr. Masur received them a few days before the rehearsal and was very happy with them. I remember they were even mentioned in a NY Times interview about the work with him and the composer where he said, “the score is very clear,” or something to that effect. (I'm sure he was talking about what the composer wrote, but we took it as a compliment.) The tension over the tardiness of the manuscript seemed to have defused now that he had half of the movements in his hands, could see what the composer had written, and saw the quality of our work. Typically orchestra librarians will get copies of the parts to the musicians well ahead of the first rehearsal for practice at home, but as the parts were being emailed from London the day before the rehearsal (and some morning of the rehearsal), and they still needed to be printed and bound, this was not feasible in this case. The musicians would just have to sightread at the first rehearsal.
A representative from our NYC team would be at all rehearsals to take note of all changes, errata, etc., that needed to be incorporated into the files while the rest of us were still cranking away on the remaining 6 movements. It turned out that the London based team had used this "Durand house style" of cues for all the parts, where the notes were slightly smaller, but the stems not flipped and no full size rests added. Since the musicians of the NY Phil were sightreading new music and this cueing style was not the typical one they were familiar with, they were playing lines that they should not have been playing, missing entrances as they weren't distinguishing them from cues, etc. The musicians all began to complain and blamed the cues. In turn, both Mr. Masur and the composer were absolutely furious and blamed the copyists. As they didn't know all the details about how the project manager had farmed the parts out to London to save money, the only copyist at the rehearsal was the guy from our team, who had to bear the brunt of their fury even though we had nothing to do with the parts and cueing style.
Mr. Masur cancelled the rest of the rehearsal and ordered the cues in the parts corrected by the following morning. The composer was seriously pissed off at everyone involved as he was operating on no sleep and was embarrassed that his music sounded so poorly at the rehearsal. After the initial catastrophic rehearsal, Mr. Masur had now again lost confidence in the project and was back on the brink of cancelling the entire concert.
The London team changed their part cues to the more familiar style, the composer finished the remaining 6 movements (although he was still writing the day before the performance), we engraved all the scores and the concert went as planned. The work was recorded by another well-known orchestra and is still available as a 2-CD set. There were many other screw-ups along the way with this job though, including the composer's project manager wasting time MIDIfying scores, his failing to have an adequate file naming system that reflected current versions and sending the wrong files to London for part extraction, etc. There were haggles over the final bill, even though the woman running the job on our end did everything as well as could possibly be expected under the insane circumstances. The majority of the bill overage was mostly due to the project manager failing to adequately estimate costs, and the composer's tardiness with the manuscript.
Obviously there were plenty of other underlying tensions involved at the first rehearsal, but the "Durand house style" of cueing really did almost derail the entire project. New orchestral music is almost never adequately rehearsed (as it is unfamiliar to the audience anyway), so cues are fairly important for the best reading. From this experience, and my own experience as someone who performs and often sightreads new music several times a week, I strongly dislike that style of cueing. It not only isn't always helpful, but it also can actively cause performance mistakes.
[/spoiler]