I had a lot of fun working with and have developed a better notation workflow for my latest project – Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake Suite (Op.20a). Swan Lake Suite is a compilation of movements from the music that Tchaikovsky wrote for the famous Swan Lake ballet. Tchaikovsky wrote to his publisher about the possibility of creating a “concert suite” version of the Swan Lake music suitable for orchestral performance, as other famous composers were also doing with their works.
This work intrigued me enough to take a closer look. I obtained a Musescore version of the suite and exported it as MusicXML and then imported that into Dorico. From there, I obtained a scan of the 1900 first edition Print from IMSLP and then compared what I had in Dorico to that scan.
There were dozens of mistakes. People are human, so we just correct what we see that needs fixing and move on along. I’m sure there’s a gremlin or two in my engraving as well. One I got the music whipped into shape, I moved on to page layout. There’s a lot of work to be done to make a score look good and this is where that happens.
I decided that since I was studying the original scan, I’d follow it’s still and even in pagination and system breaks. This makes it possible to do a side-by-side comparison of my modern engraving, and that (rough looking) scan of that 125 year old print. To do this, I used Dorico’s score condensing feature.
Dorico allows you to input the music for all instruments and then chosse kinds and type of print layouts you want later on. You can do individual instrument layouts, sections, ensembles, full orchestral scores, and even condensed scores. A condensed full score was what I was after, since that is what the old scan is, condensed and transposing.
You can find my contribution to IMSLP here. The original 1900 first edition scan is there as well.