Re: Percussion Setups for Contemporary Music Practice

[Mark Polesky]

Bernardo Barros wrote:
> 1. How can I indicate with precision in the score itself
> where is the location of each instrument?  Perhaps with
> post-editing in Illustrator with arrow?  Must be a more
> elegant solution.

Perhaps a more semantic solution would be to use a different
Staff (or RhythmicStaff) for each instrument, then you could
set each Staff.instrumentName individually to a markup.*
But that might introduce a different bag of headaches with
staff switches, etc.  You'd also have to get all your
vertical layout options set pretty strictly.  I don't
imagine that being trivial, but perhaps there are some
tricks I don't know.

*For a while now, I've been fiddling (off and on) with a
patch that would make it easier to draw your own pictograms,
which would help out a lot in this situation.  Hmm, maybe
I should try to find time to look at that again....

> 2. How can I change this configuration in the middle of a
> piece?  Let's say in page 10 I want a completely different
> setup starting in the middle of the page or wherever is
> the setup change in the score.

My advice: DON'T DO IT.  Percussion scores are confusing
enough as it is.  I challenge you to find a percussionist
who doesn't prefer the score order to be consistent.  Do you
own a copy of "Music Notation in the Twentieth Century" by
Kurt Stone?  It's indispensible.  On p.216, he states very
clearly:

  There is, however, one principle which should never be
  ignored: No matter which kind of notation and score order
  has been chosen, it must be adhered to throughout a given
  composition or movement.

The footnote that follows directs the reader to the
"Handbook of Percussion Instruments" by Peinkofer and
Tannigel, which "contains an exceptionally comprehensive
sampling of percussion notation and score setups."

> 3. is there an easy way to determine which note is
> correspondent to what instrument?  Maybe a fancy function
> will do that?

I suggest using pictograms following Stone's example.  I'll
try to look at my pictogram code again.  Honestly, if
someone wants to support this, that might motivate me to
budget more time for it.

- Mark