Too many notes ... piano scores tend to be
very bulky. Photograph: Don McPhee
An authors' magazine recently reported on new handheld reading devices which enable you to download entire books onto them, and to display the text in a variety of ways, writes Susan Tomes. Words can flash on screen one at a time, or run from left to right as normal, and the scrolling speed can be determined by the reader. Whole collections of books can be downloaded, so that you can carry enormous volumes of text without freighting yourself with masses of books.
As a pianist I read this with envy. When I go on tour with other musicians carrying their violin and cello cases, their clarinet and horn cases, people often say to me, "Lucky you! You don't have to carry your instrument with you." Yet they're unaware that in my suitcase are several kilos of printed music.
Most instrumentalists have a part containing no more than a few pages, because their part contains only the line that they play. Yet pianists and conductors work from a score in which all the parts are printed. For example, in a chamber work for piano and four other instruments, all five parts are printed in the piano score. And as the piano part already has double the amount of print (lines for right hand and left hand) it means that piano scores are considerably fatter than others.
Add to this the tradition of publishing collected volumes of works, and the weight piles on. For a single concert of, say, three piano trios, I have to take (for example) the complete collected trios of Mozart, the complete trios of Brahms and a whole thick volume of Beethoven. Multiply that for a concert tour with several different programmes.
The number of pages in a piano score has another side-effect: I need to have a page-turner at the concert. Otherwise, I have to turn the page with my left hand every minute or less, so I can't play the left-hand notes at the bottom of one page, or at the top of the next. And sometimes I stop playing altogether if I get in a muddle and need both hands to smooth down the pages.
And so, when I'm playing from the music, I always have someone sitting next to me - usually someone I've never met before. Page-turners are often very charming and helpful, yet along with most pianists I would prefer to be alone at the piano.
So of course I would love to have a single electronic device onto which I could load copies of the scores. I imagine that I would place the screen on the music desk of the piano. But how would the scrolling speed be determined? Each piece of music goes at a different speed, and within each movement there are often faster and slower sections.
There would have to be a subtle way of varying the speed of notes scrolling past. I did once see a cellist demonstrate an electronic score-reader in a concert of contemporary music. He turned the pages on screen by means of a foot pedal. But pianists' feet are already busy with the piano pedals. Some other method would have to be found for us. Body heat? Electronic assessment of rapid eye movements?
I read in the Guardian the other day that scientists are working on a method whereby an electronic device could learn to recognise the neurological field of your brainwaves. Something as finely calibrated as that would be needed for music to scroll past at the correct speed. Any ideas, scientists?
