Writing on Sheet Music

[John Morgan]

Thank you for all the information!

This clears up a lot about ensemble parts, but would anything be different with solo repertoire? For example, I listen to a recording of my solo piece/excerpt and the music doesn't have much written, but the soloist is adding crescendos, adding hairpins, making one passage more separated than another, using rubato, etc. Would it be appropriate to mark down the soloist's interpretation, or try and develop this on your own through studying the music without any extra markings?

When I work on solo music (I usually play a solo with the our New Horizons Band each year - and this means for a whole semester of rehearsals, then 5-10 performances), I start usually by listening to several versions of the solo (maybe on euphonium, maybe on trumpet, maybe on trombone). I make notes on my solo part. I also make notes on the score to go over with the conductor. Score notes include tempo, tempo changes, ritardendo's, removing a 1st ending here or there, and many more possible things. I almost always change up things in the solos. Particularly the cadenzas. I might end up writing out the altered/new cadenza using music notation software.

Then I go about doing like Dave for breath marks, this is near and dear to me as a former smoker. I sometimes have to make minor changes in a line or phrase to handle my partially diminished lung capacity. But no one will generally know this at all. If I have heard another soloist play a particular part of the solo one way that I really liked, I may "borrow" this, although I do try to generally make the changes my own creation. But my music definitely gets marked up. I make my own copy of the solo because of this.

And, after all this marking, most of the time I play the solos from memory, but having those notes in the music helps me get everything sorted out initially and I commit the original music and my changes to memory. But I do use the music early on in the rehearsals.

Needless to say, the band members have a lot of marks on their music as well.