To be honest, though, whilst the scores we are working on have given plenty for the SSC to scratch its joint head over, what surprises me is how clearly presented the scores are. Of course Brian was creating a fair copy for posterity, and it was his aim, I am sure, to make the manuscript as clear as possible. On the other hand, writing out, for the second or third time, a finished work must have been deadly dull.

Your living composer, whose music one is only copying because a performance has been secured, usually feels able to make liberal use of short cuts in writing out the score. One English composer, whose new opera was premiered very recently, gave me a single crotchet in the bass line at the start of a section plus sim on that and the next half dozen pages with the expectation that I would be able to deduce the bass line of this passage from the supplied piano reduction. Perfectly possible, but a risky tactic best adopted only given the extremely tight timescale for the production of the full score.

So, issues in deciphering symphonies 22, 23 and 24 really arise from the inaccuracies of an old man transcribing in haste. These are typically misplaced noteheads, hairpins all over the place, missing or inconsistent accents, failure to ‘turn off’ con sordino [with mute], pizzicato, and other modifiers.

There are various degrees of change:

- Obvious correction: for example, where Brian simply omits an accidental, or where accents are clearly inconsistent between parts

- Pretty obvious correction: say, where it is clear that violins should be arco after a previous pizz passage, this being obvious, for example, because the new passage is full of long tied notes marked espressivo

- Difficult correction: for example, brass are marked con sord and, after a collection of highly disparate passages, are marked con sord again. Should there be a senza sord [without mute] marking somewhere between the two, or is HB merely confirming the continuity of the previous marking?

There again, there are instances where we have chosen to enforce a standard for clarity. For example, About 90% of the time, Brian writes a staccato when the note’s tail is pointing up, but staccatissimi when the tail is pointing down. Does he really mean a distinction in performance according to whether the stems point up or down? Since there are places where a transposing instrument has a note the other way up to another instrument playing in unison with it and HB has followed his rule, we have inferred that Brian meant only one playing technique and we have invariably have put simple stacc marks. Frankly, in the time available to rehearse and record the music, noone will pay the slightest attention to distinguishing staccati and staccatissimi anyway.

An example of where we have intervened is Brian’s use of hairpins (ie small crescendi and, occasionally, diminuendi). Taken at face value, and noting that dims only occasionally appear, the strict interpretation of these markings would mean that each symphony started to loud and, with in a page, was impossibly loud and stayed that way. Brian is clearly (?) using these as expression marks, intending them to indicate a short term (less than a bar) ebb and flow. Having observed the cresc, the player should revert tot he dynamic at the start of the hairpin, ready to essay the next cresc. Rather like a boat bobbing up and down on the swell of the sea.

This isn’t actually the problem since this playing technique can be dealt with by a small piece of text in the score. The problem is that the hairpins are rarely aligned vertically. Taken literally, every instrument playing would start their hairpin at a slightly different time and would extend dot for a different duration. Whilst one could imagine a music in which this is a compositional feature, I don’t think anybody believes this is what Brian wanted. So the copyist has to work out where the ‘swell’ starts and ends.

At this point I must explain the lack of examples. The copyists are working with photocopies of the original manuscript. To create a master for the NL printer would involve photocopying or scanning this copy. The printing of the NL copies would constitute a third copying stage. The result would be illegible.

Having sorted out all the things the conductor would otherwise have to sort out him or herself, as well as corrected Brian’s slips and errors, there is still work to be done. One unendearing aspect of Brian’s manuscript style is that he transposes transposing instruments (fair enough, though not done these days even in tonal music) but doesn’t provide the right key signature. Transposing parts are ostensibly ‘in C’ just as non-transposing parts are. So all the accidentals have to be written into the parts. This often results in the same phrase appearing in flats in one instrument and in sharps in another. This is not strictly speaking wrong, but it will certainly slow the conductor down, making his task harder. So we will be producing the full scores ‘in C’ with no transpositions—though, of course, the parts will be transposed properly.

In making these copies, we are decidedly not making a critical edition. That would take too long, is probably beyond the abilities of anyone on the Scores Subcommittee and, I will argue in the next part of this piece, is a pointless exercise.

I say good enough because the nature of contemporary music making ensures that, if/when these works are performed, there simply will not be enough time to rehearse down to the level of detail we are talking about here. I am particularly thinking of the hairpins which demand rationalisation, even though at best we could hope that the conductor observes the rationalised version, he or she certainly won’t even think about reproducing them as written (which wasn’t how HB wanted them anyway!).

... more to follow