RNZ Interview: Copying scores in a digital age

This past Thursday (April 17th) I had the privilege to chat with Radio New Zealand’s Bryan Crump on their classical-focused program Three to Seven. We talked about the quirks of music preparation in the age of digital music, what I’ve been up to during my time living in New Zealand, and contemplated the feasibility of a French horn version of Guitar Hero.

You can listen to the original segment on the RNZ website here.

 

 

Bryan Crump: Yes, that's a bit of the Adagio from Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony - the one which has the big French horn solo in it - and that's the introduction for my guest today: the multi-talented Taran Plamondon, who's with me to talk about his multifaceted musical career. You see, he's a music copyist, I understand, usually based in Canada, but right now he's acting sub principal horn with the Auckland Philharmonia, and he joins me now in our Auckland studio. Kia ora, Taran!

Taran: Hi Bryan! It's great to meet you.

B: Great to have you on. Now, are you going to be playing that with the Auckland Philharmonia, that horn solo?

T: Well, we will be playing that piece pretty soon. I will not be the one playing the horn solo itself - I've performed it many times in the practice room to far less success than that - but it will be our wonderful principal horn and glorious leader, Gaby Pho on Principal Horn. She has such an incredible sound that… I just want to steal it! So you can't miss it. I mean, it's just every horn player’s dream.

B: Is it one of the pieces that really gets people into the French horn? That solo?

T: Yeah, exactly. It's so impactful. I mean, I listen to that just to have a good cry or even sometimes if I want to have a good cheer, you know, that kind of music gets me going.

B: So how long have you been in the country, Taran?

T: I got here in February 2024, so it's been about 14 months.

B: Ah, you’ve well and truly settled then.

T: Yeah. I mean, I feel like I've settled pretty well. I love it here. I'm not sure if I'll be here permanently, but I'm making the most of my time while I am here.

B: Now, your business, Éditions Plamondon. What do you do?

T: Right, so Éditions Plamondon is a music preparation and publishing service. Like you mentioned, we are based out of Canada technically, and it's sort of the reason I was able to move here. For lack of a better term, it was kind of my “side hustle” while I lived in Canada. It was something I started in November 2020 as kind of a formalization, you know, coalescence of work that I was already doing. I would occasionally get these freelance gigs to do arrangements and music engraving, which - I can go more into depth into what that is in a second.

B: Oh yes, I definitely want to know more about that. Yeah.

T: Yeah. But I was able to move here and change that to be my kind of full time job. It's my main focus now. Essentially, we work with composers and orchestras and ensembles to edit and proofread their music and format it to professional publication standards.

B: That's the thing that interested me when I saw engraving, copying. And I'm thinking, we live in a digital world now... We've just played that piece by Ferdinand Ries, and when I think of copying, I think of him. 

T: Yeah!

B: I think of, you know, Ludwig giving him some more work. You read my scrawl, you turn it into something that we can get an orchestra to play. But this is the digital age now, and yet there’s still work for copyists!

T: I'm glad you mentioned that. You see, I think the term “music engraving” is kind of a antiquated term. So it's the obsolete practice of, you know, literally engraving sheet music onto metal plates for impression. Before the age of computers, this was the most efficient way for sheet music publishers to operate. They would just meticulously engrave every single note onto a copper plate and all the details, all the slurs. Everything backwards, I should mention, because of course when you print it onto paper, it flips.

B: That's right.

An example of plate-engraved music from the University of Illinois Library. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

T: And you know, it's sort of an antiquated term like “press.” You know, you don't literally use a printing press to make the newspaper anymore, but they still call it “the press.”

B: Yeah.

T: So it's that same vein.

B: How does it work, then? So, somebody might be creating a piece of music in, say, Sibelius, which is the music composing and arranging software, and then what do you do to turn it into something that other people can use?

T: Right. The point of music engraving specifically, it's not a creative process. It's almost more of a graphic design process. So I'm there to anticipate problems in the sheet music, in the Sibelius file, that might arise during rehearsal, and basically eliminate these problems before they happen, or at least mitigate them. So like, a really pure example of a music engraving project would be if a composer gave me their handwritten manuscript and asked me to clean it up, my job would be to fully digitize it into Sibelius, the scorewriter software - it's the kind of the lead, main one that we use.

B: Yes.

T: And during that process, I will need to make a few decisions about things that are unclear to read at first sight, or things that could be fixed or improved, and then I send it back to the composer with my notes. So if I've done my job correctly, the composer will feel like this newly digitized version of their piece represents their music precisely and as accurately as their handwritten manuscript.

B: How much of the work you get is still handwritten stuff?

T: In practice, very very little. Most composers use some sort of digital software, whether that's Sibelius, um, there's a kind of old dinosaur one called Finale that's deprecated now - it's obsolete, but we use that as well. Sometimes I'll get something in a Digital Audio Workstation - like GarageBand is maybe the most popular one of that, but from film composers there's a number of them that they use.

B: Do you add your own touches though - to the style, the look of the music on the page?

T: Yeah, kind of. So, I have my own templates and my own things that I think look really good in sheet music. My goal is to make it look really professional and polished, so to distinguish it from, just, you know, amateur work, or something that hasn't seen that second set of eyes. And of course, I can add value via my own expertise. So, you know, I'm aware of publication standards. I'm always looking at new editions by some of the biggest sheet music publishers. So, I can add my own expertise with regards to page sizes, music fonts, margins, even like the thickness of the staff lines. That kind of stuff is my job to think about.

FORT COLLINS, COLORADO: Éditions Plamondon publications on display at the 2024 International Horn Symposium.

B: You told me you started the business in November 2020. Why did you start it?

T: Well, I am a French horn player by trade. Of course, I studied it growing up. And I remember I was in Toronto studying at the Glenn Gould School, which is one of our most prestigious conservatories in Canada. When, right after I graduated, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and live music was not really much of a thing for about a year and a half.

So, my freelancing career was out the window and I thought I should diversify a little bit. This was already work that I was doing, this music engraving, and arranging as well, which is another component of it, and so I decided to, you know, with my newfound free time during the COVID pandemic to learn a couple new skills. So I learned basic graphic design, I learned some basic video editing, basic website design, that kind of thing, and all these skills came in handy to sort of formalize my work as a music preparation specialist into an actual brand and company.

B: You told me already, before that, there was a bit of engraving and arranging going on in your life. How did that come about? What interested you in the actual, I guess, the language of music printed on a page, beyond playing it?

T: I think we have to go back even a little bit further. When I was in high school, in, you know, in high school band, I picked up the French horn when I was about 13. I always loved playing French horn, but I think the thing that really interests me in music… I love to listen to so many different genres, and when I hear something I like, I just want to analyze it and deconstruct it and figure out what makes it tick. And I've always been like that.

So, whether it's, you know, the Grieg Piano Concerto, I'm like, “wow, this is so incredible sounding - what makes it sound the way it does?” Or even one specific chord in a David Bowie song. I just, I need to figure out what it is.

B: And you like to write those down?

T: Oh, yeah.

B: Are you one of those people that maybe you hear something, and next thing you're writing out those five lines and then putting the notes in, on some blank piece of paper?

T: Most definitely. If I hear something that interests me, I want to write it down. So, I started out as a composition student in my undergraduate degree, and I quickly realized it wasn't for me. I actually just liked fiddling around with the scorewriter software. I didn't really like the pressure of having composition deadlines.

B: Somebody else can do that.

T: Yeah, exactly! And I felt like, it's not that I don't have anything to say that's new. I just didn't feel like I needed to say it through that medium. I actually prefer being able to help other composers realize their vision more clearly and more accurately. It brings me more satisfaction, I guess.

B: Okay, so you've managed to get this business going, Éditions Plamondon, and then you come to New Zealand. That sounds like just stretching yourself a bit thin, there,

T: Well, most of my clientele is still in Canada, although that's been changing a little bit since I've worked with the Auckland Philharmonia in that capacity as well, in my capacity as a music preparation specialist. But the nice thing is that almost all of my work can be done just with a computer and an internet connection.

Basically, people will send me files over their dropbox. Just today, I got a score from Toronto that I'm going to run through the, you know, a scorewriter software, and I'm going to do all the editing. It will take a couple of weeks, since it's a large orchestra piece, and then you just send it back to Toronto, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra librarian will handle all the printing and stuff. So it's all digital.

GATINEAU, QUÉBEC: Proofreading scores at my desk in February 2023.

B: My guest today is Taran Plamondon. He's a French horn player. He is also a music copyist. You might have noticed the Canadian accent, but these days he lives in Auckland. He's Principal… Sub-Principal Horn, actually, you got to get those definitions right. Sub Principal Horn. Does that mean you're number two on the bench?

T: Not really - it's sort of a technicality, like the way that they labeled the roles is hard to explain, but essentially I'm fourth horn for the year.

B: If I just said you’re French horn player, that would do, wouldn't it?

T: Yeah. Yeah, totally. I'm playing fourth horn functionally. Sometimes I will play second horn.

B: How'd you hear about the job in Auckland?

T: Well actually, this ties into the reason I moved to Auckland, which was via my girlfriend, Kira Shiner. She's currently the Acting Principal Cor Anglais, or English horn, of the Auckland Philharmonia.

B: Right. French horn and English horn, and they’re a couple! That's a beautiful story.

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND: Me & Kira onstage after a performance at Auckland Town Hall.

T: Yep, the duality is not lost on us. So, she was offered a contract in May 2023, just kind of out of the blue. And she's a phenomenal, you know, amazing oboe player, so these sorts of opportunities pop up for her a lot. And at the time I thought, “that's so cool. I wish I could go with her. That's so fun.” But I couldn't at the time. I just, you know, I was working a job in Ottawa, it was a great job, I was working in development, in fundraising for the National Arts Centre Orchestra, and I couldn't just uproot my life to go join my girlfriend for a six month contract.

So we did a long distance relationship for six months. It was fine. I got to visit and I loved it - I visited for two weeks. And then, when her contract got extended, because I guess they really liked her. I thought, “okay, this is my chance. I’ve got to get over to New Zealand and experience it and live there for a bit.”

And the timing was perfect, because I'd been building this business up, Éditions Plamondon, for about three and a half years at that point - my math might be off on that - but, I had enough clientele that I thought, okay, I can eke out a living doing this full time now, just barely.

B: How's the juggling of playing the horn and doing this work as a copyist? How's that going?

T: It comes in waves. So right at this very moment, I have a bunch of converging deadlines all in the same week. So it's very very, intense, very stressful, but again, very rewarding work. And sometimes those copyist deadlines converge with concert weeks, and sometimes they don't. So because of the Easter weekend, we're not playing anything this week.

B: So you're going to be flat out doing copying over Easter, are you?

T: Oh yes, most definitely. It will be a “music copyist Easter.” I will be in front of my computer for most of it.

B: Okay. How's your work life balance then?

T: At this specific moment it's not great, but there are some weeks where I have actually very little music copyist work to do. So, I can sort of spearhead my own projects. And those days, everything is quite balanced. I think being in New Zealand has also encouraged me to go outside a lot more, because the weather is - I know it doesn't seem like it right now when we're getting hit by cyclones up here in Auckland - but the weather's quite a bit better than Canada's weather in general.

B: Where did you grow up in Canada?

T: I'm born in Edmonton, in Alberta.

B: Right.

T: So that's the capital city of Alberta, and it's a little smaller than Auckland I think, in terms of population.

B: We know Edmonton, well some of us do who are old enough, because it was a Commonwealth Games there in 1978, I think.

T: Oh my gosh, really?

B: Yeah.

T: I feel like I should know that - hometown history.

EDMONTON, ALBERTA: The 1978 Commonwealth Games and opening of Commonwealth Stadium.

B: Never mind, you’re possibly too young. I'm showing my age here. So you moved, you did your study over East in Toronto, did you?

T: Yeah, so I did my undergraduate degree in my hometown. Again, I started with composition, but very very quickly switched to French horn as my focus. Then I moved to Toronto where, you know, everything's happening - it's a huge city. There's all these smaller cities with orchestras around, so I got the chance to cut my teeth on the freelancing scene there. And I also got a couple of gigs here and there, again, doing copyist work. And sometimes I would receive a part for a concert, I would go, “oh, this part is so ugly, I hate it. I could do such a better job of this.” So, I think that seed was planted early, that I wanted to have my own little publishing operation.

B: You know, Taran, I don't often get to speak to a copyist. And I wonder, you know how we imagine the great composers, you know, working away furiously, writing all this stuff down. Now, how often was the donkey work - once they could afford it - being done by somebody else?

T: Most of the time, with some exceptions, which I can mention, but definitely like Beethoven, Mozart, all of those big composers, you know, Schubert, they all had publishers that would commission the copperplate engraving for them. I know in the late 1700s there was a technique called lithography that got created. It was this chemical process where you could lift a composer's handwriting and publish it. But generally speaking, most music was literally engraved onto plates, and that would never, ever be the composer himself doing that - or herself, I should say. So yeah, a lot of these great composers had copyists that worked for them, and I actually think that needs to be taken into account more when we look at these scores. Sometimes a mistake is not Beethoven's mistake. It's the copyist’s mistake.

B: I wanted to ask you about Guitar Hero. Now, I know at the moment you're pretty busy, and you maybe don’t have a lot of time for your pastimes, but Guitar Hero is one of them, and this caught our eye as well here at Three to Seven, because that's some kind of a video game, isn't it?

T: Yeah. I'm very pleased that you found that video. Basically, Guitar Hero kind of had its heyday in the late 2000s, you know, 2006, 2007.

B: Yeah, that’s why my son hasn't heard of it.

T: It's this plastic guitar game where you have five buttons as frets, you know, it looks like a guitar. You have five buttons, and then you have a strum bar. It's not a real string. You just flick the strum bar up and down to play the notes.

B: Is this physical, material? Or is this something virtual on a computer screen that you're manipulating?

T: It is a plastic controller that you hold. But then, of course, the notes are just all virtual.

B: Right.

T: Basically they've, you know, taken these rock songs and charted the guitar part into these five notes as a video game thing. And these games are really old and they're not super popular anymore. They're seeing a bit of a resurgence, but generally it's a bit of an old format. But I always thought, “someone needs to chart Beethoven's Violin Concerto onto this game,” you know?

B: Right. I can see a connection here with other aspects of your life.

T: Oh yeah. I mean, the notation aspect of it. What makes this piece tick? You know, I love to deconstruct these things. And Guitar Hero was where I wrote some of my earliest compositions. They had a little composing thing within it. It was really, really limited.

B: I have vaguely heard of that, yeah. How successful were those compositions?

T: Oh my goodness. I mean, I think I still have them sitting around on an old hard drive somewhere. You know what, though? One of the best ways to learn how to compose music and how to understand music is just to write some of it.

B: Yeah.

T: Yeah. Just go ahead and write, make a whole bunch of mistakes and maybe your copyist can catch those mistakes for you eventually.

B: So I guess there isn't a horn version of Guitar Hero.

T: Sadly no. There should be, but I don't know how that would work.

B: Yeah, you'd need to have, what, a virtual horn, three valves, wouldn't you?

T: I guess. Three valves and the thumb valve. And then there'd need to be some sort of pressure sensor that would be converted into data that the computer could read.

B: Because so much of the notes are controlled, not by what your fingers are doing, they’re controlled by what your lips are doing, right?

T: Exactly. And so I think it would be tough to have a computer read the inputs from your mouthpiece buzzing. You know, your lips are literally buzzing together like a reed. It would be hard for the computer to read that and distinguish a pitch from it.

French Horn Hero doesn’t exist (yet!), but that hasn’t stopped the internet from creating a logo for it.

B: Are you a cyclist in your spare time, Taran?

T: Yeah! I'm not a very hardcore cyclist.

B: Did you cycle to work today? Did you cycle to our studio?

T: No, I actually live right down the block. It was a one block walk for me.

B: Oh, lucky you.

T: Also, we're in the middle of a cyclone, so it was not a great idea to do any cycling today. Personally, something I love about New Zealand - this is related, I promise - is the coffee. I mean, coming from Canada, we have Tim Hortons, which is positively mediocre coffee.

B: What did you call that?

T: Tim Hortons.

B: Tim Hortons. Never heard of it.

T: Yeah It's our most popular coffee brand in Canada. They’re everywhere.

B: Is it like Canada’s answer to Starbucks or something?

T: Yeah, I guess. They're really, really popular in Canada. And it's kind of like the “baseline coffee,” you just need something to wake you up. So I'm used to that growing up. Coming to New Zealand, there's these amazing cafés everywhere. I mean, I took to the flat white immediately. I love them. And so as a cyclist - I'm tying this back - I drop a pin on some café somewhere in the city. Sometimes it's, you know, just down the road in Ponsonby, sometimes it's way up in Albany. Recently I went all the way up to Shakespear Park, up in Whangaparāoa.

B: Very nice.

T: I just pick out a café and that's where I cycle to for the day.

B: La Gare. La Gare café in Papatoetoe. That's worth going for.

T: Good to know!

B: If you decide that there's too much traffic on the roads, you can always put the bike on the train because it's near the station, being called La Gare.

T: Right.

B: It’s the old station building at Papatoetoe. They put it on wheels, moved it about 300 metres down the railway line and stuck it there next to the road, and it's now a café.

T: I love stuff like that. That's amazing.

B: Yeah.

T: That's my next cycling goal, I think.

B: Yeah, I always try to help out South Auckland businesses because that's where my family's from. That's where we still live, we’ve still got a family home. Have you done any big New Zealand bike rides?

T: No. Here's where the limitations of my abilities come in. I have a $200 bicycle that I got on Facebook Marketplace, so it's really like a, you know, scrappy sort of operation when I go cycling. I'm not all about speed. I'm not about cadence. I'm not about heart rate. I just want to go long distances. And so, usually I do them within one day. I don't have any sort of gear to stay the night, so the longest distance I've done, I think, is about 170km.

B: In a day?

T: Yep. In one day.

B: That is very good. That’s a good ride.

T: It's pretty far. That's like a big dedication.

B: Where was that to?

T: That one in particular was, just before I moved here, I visited a friend in Providence, Rhode Island, and I cycled all the way to Plymouth, Massachusetts, on the coast. And then I biked back, which made it a full 170km.

B: Did you have a tailwind?

T: Oh, no, I wish I did. It was scorching hot.

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND: Me struggling up a hill in the Waitakere Ranges east of Auckland. [Photo credit: Matt Crawford]

B: Now, Taran, I was thinking, taking this full circle back to your work as a copyist: isn't there a point that we might reach, where everything, all the music, is on a screen? Is it the end of copying?

T: There's a lot of discussion about this, you know. I'm part of a lot of music engraver community groups, things on Facebook and on forums and stuff like that. And there's a lot of discussion about that: “is this the end of paper in sheet music?” And personally, I think paper will always have some role in sheet music. The reason that I like paper is because I stare at screens for a huge portion of my day, and so the opportunity to read music is one of the rare chances where I'm not staring at a screen. So I don't want to replace that experience with a screen.

And there will always be people of the older generation in classical music just, you know, in orchestras and stuff who are not really that receptive to new technological advances. And I actually think in the case of screens, you know, using an iPad, for example, in the place of sheet music, there are a lot of downsides that are really pretty obvious when you think about them. You know like, a piece of paper can't run out of battery, a piece of paper won't overheat in the sun. You don't have to worry about the piece of paper falling off the stand and breaking, and then, you know, you have to get it repaired. Yeah. Personally, I'm of the opinion that there will always be some role for paper.

B: And even if there isn't much of a role for paper, could this still be a role for transferring whatever was done in the composing software into something which actually looks really nice on a tablet or whatever it might be, whatever medium it might be in the future?

T: Most definitely. I think that a lot of music, I'd say the vast majority of music is now written in something called a digital audio workstation. I mentioned that earlier; GarageBand is kind of the most famous example.

B: Yeah.

T: And that is probably the most effective way to make, literally release, a single or a track or a recording or something you made. But if you want to collaborate with people, if you want to organize a collective of people to perform live music, you do need some sort of notation that can coordinate them, and sheet music currently is the best tool we have for that. So I think there will be a role for the foreseeable future for actual sheet music, and by extension, people who polish it and make sure it's up to standard.

B: Taran, when’s your next French horn performance with the Philharmonia?

T: Ooh, well, actually it's not the very next one - the very next one's on May 1st, which should be lots of fun, it's Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, which I'm a huge fan of - but one that I really want to hype up is that Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, which, of course, you heard before this.

B: Yeah.

T: That's coming up on May 15th. That's, I mean, a program that really speaks to the French horn player in me. It's an incredible work. And I think we're also doing Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3.

B: Yep.

T: So again, that's May 15th, at 7:30 at Town Hall. And I personally am so privileged that I get to sit right behind our principal horn, Gaby Pho, who's going to be playing the solo because, I think I've said this already, but her sound, you can't miss it. It's incredible.

B: And I know you kind of hinted you can't answer this question, but I’ll ask it anyway to finish. Any chances of you becoming a permanent New Zealand resident? You and your partner?

T: Hard to say. You know, when I first got here, I intended to be here for about eight months, and, you know, just focus on Éditions Plamondon, my business, and build it up as much as I could while I had the free time to do it. And then more and more opportunities have come our way, so we're kind of like, we really like it here. So we'll stick around as long as there are opportunities drawing us here, I'd say.

B: Taran, thank you so much for joining us today and enjoy that next cup of coffee.

T: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

B: At La Gare if you get that far south.

T: Noted.

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND: In the RNZ studio.