Quote:
Tom wrote: >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.56 pieces, or 70, or 20, for that matter. As already said, you don't orchestrate for 70 musicians if a score will only have 56 available.


In the old Big Studio days each had a Steno Department that employed dozens of typists whose sole job it was to prepare master pages for the mimeograph machines that were used to print the copies of the studio's films in production. As changes were received, new pages had to be prepared and, as you may imagine, the logistics of all this were frightful, as was the storage of all this material until each film was deemed completed and it was no longer needed.

Today, all one does is put a copy of a script in the photocopier's feeder, push a few buttons, and voilà! A new script (nowadays, they're frequently printed on both sides of the page to save money and the environment) is spat out, all collated and sorted, in ninety seconds.

The same held true down at the Music Department: orchestrators gave their completed work to teams of copyists, who then laboriously made, by hand, as many copies of each player part the orchestrator indicated, so that they'd be ready for the upcoming recording session. That, too, is now the province of the photocopier. If there are twenty violin parts, with each musician playing the same thing, then one merely sets the copying machine to make twenty sets of violin parts. No muss, no fuss.

Obviously, there are still copyists working in the modern world, as there are still composers who write their music in longhand, eschewing Midis and other computer hard- and software, and some of them have deplorable handwriting that needs to be cleaned up before proceeding to the orchestrator, but the days of armies of copyists toiling into the night to ensure that each player has a clean score in front of him/her at the next morning's scoring session are long gone.

Another example of how the invention of the photostatic copying machine changed the world!