Sometime in 2010, It must have been in the Spring, R.C. Staab and I submitted Zombie Wedding to the Academy for New Musical Theatre in LA for a screen cast open reading. This is a service the Academy staff offer in which the senior faculty read through and then review a few scenes or a couple songs from a musical in development. I found the whole experience very helpful and would certainly recommend it for anyone doing anything a little ambitious. Aside from general lyrical and musical notes, much breath was spent belying my piano score, from the size of the cord symbols, the use of ties notes and other such and such that one would think was rather petty considering the show was only in an early reading. Well one would be wrong.

Piano scores need to be set out to be as simple to read, navigate and interpret as is possible. This is because when you are in workshopping stages, every minute matters. You cannot afford to have actors mull on about the pages not being numbered or the lyrics being on the wrong side of the stave. Actors will pick at everything, they are hounds for detail.

I’d like to invite everybody to contribute in this, as I’m certain there is no concise school of how piano scores should be laid out. I will put down my own bullet point list and the points raised on the ANMT screen cast, and then I will add new ones from the comments (if I like them).

• Page numbers – Write them on the piano score and in the libretto.
• Table of contents – For easy song-finding
• Chord symbols – For easy(ish) transposing and for less gifted pianists (like myself) to sight read.
• Treble Clef for all vocal parts – No bass clef for voices in musical theatre. Not never.
• Tempo and Expression – Use common tempo descriptions, you are not Mahler. Never just have a bpm number. Likewise your pianist might not be a doctorate of obscurantist popular music, so just write Light Swing, not 50′s Revival 80′s Trip-Bebop

These last bullets might just be crackpotisms of my own, but try them on for size…

• Break up your song – If a song has an underscore-laden introduction, then make that a different musical cue to the song itself. Then have the song proper beginning on the first bar of the vocal melody.
• “Song” Page Numbers – So along with being on page 120 of the score, you are reading page 9 of the song.
• Favour long notes – We are not in the classical era anymore. Do not write “busy” music at 60 bpm in semi-demi-quavers when you could more easily write it at 120 bpm in semi-quavers. It’s looks intimidating for sight-singers and can catch players out. Some of the Les Mis piano score score has this popping up. The orchestral score does not.

I can’t think of any more right now. What do you think?