The bit about the number of violins as a budgetary limitation was intended as joke, but there an element of truth there, at least in film music.

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There must be times though, when you need to indicate on a short score how many violins will play a particular passage.


Why? The purpose of the short score is used to produce a "long" score, which does not necessarily indicate the number of players, though it can. The A&R person needs to know how many violinists to hire and the copyist needs to know how many copies are needed. That information can go a different route. A standalone orchestrator does not need to know the number of players. That detail can be decided or filled in later.

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But perhaps a composer wanting to scale up for a concert or album might actually prefer to rewrite a whole piece if the effect will be so different.


If only the number of players changes, no changes are required to the full score or the parts. If the number of players on parts is changing through a piece, that has to be noted somewhere, of course.

In the score examples in Fred Karlin's On the Track, some full scores indicate the number of strings and others don't. Conventions are probably different for concert works. The written materials of film music are often "spartan." They are only intended to be used once, after all.

For a concrete example, Fred Karlin's other book, Listening to Movies, shows Goldsmith's 8 stave short score and Arthur Morton's resulting full score for a few bars of Star Trek --The Motion Picture. There probably other examples around.