When I write music I am fantastically careful about the preparation of parts. I try extremely hard to make sure that everything is prepared and presented so well as to make life as easy as possible for anyone who will be learning, playing or conducting my music. Why? Firstly on selfish grounds, because they probably won't have infinite preparation time and so any time they spend deciphering unclear notation takes away from learning to play my music better and will mean a less good performance. Secondly out of respect for the players, to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude that they have chosen my music ahead of the squillions of other pieces out there, and the least I can do to repay them is to give them something legible to play from. Thirdly out of pride that I was taught how to produce properly notated music and am able to do it and I don't want anyone to think I'm one of the people I'm about to moan about. Obviously despite all one's efforts the occasional mistake creeps in. All the more reason to try harder; without one's best efforts the number of mistakes will rise astronomically.
I get really impatient when I find myself learning music by other people who haven't taken the same care that I would expect of myself. This probably isn't the place to try to prepare a notation handbook and so I'm not going to attempt an exhaustive list of everything you ought to know if you're preparing music for performers, though such handbooks do exist and it would be nice if composers who prepare their own materials consulted one from time to time. But just so you know what I'm talking about here are a few examples.
1. Cautionary accidentals. Not providing these is the single biggest 'f*** you' to performers that composers are guilty of. If you have a G# before the barline and a G natural after the barline then the natural sign is NOT optional. If in doubt, put one. It's also not patronising to restate an accidental towards the end of the bar that we've forgotten since the beginning because it's so chromatic in between. Better too much information than too little.
2. 8va lines. Please remember: the number of objects the eye can instantly see and know the number without counting is five. Throw some matches on the floor and try it. After five you have to count. Reading music there isn't time to do this. Do not use more than five leger lines.
3. Consistent placing of staves on the page. In a given section or ensemble, if I am following the part of Bob the Builder and I turn the page, his part should continue at the same vertical point on the page. If that means having an empty stave for Tinky Winky, who has 5 bars' rest so doesn't sing anything on that system, that's fine. Constantly juggling the parts so that you have to keep moving the eye up and down is a complete nightmare. This isn't a hard and fast rule; you have to be intelligent about it. But if we are talking about an ensemble that lasts, say 50 bars, and involves 8 singers, hold the number of staves constant. If it's 200 bars and 2 of the singers only have 3 lines then you might not. This applies more to vocal scores, for full scores you probably wouldn't use empty staves.
4. If you don't use computers and produce handwritten scores, that is fine on principle. But engraving music by hand is an art. It is highly skilled expert work for a professional and if you are a career composer then you probably haven't had time to learn it properly. Not by most of the evidence available, anyway. Give it to someone who knows what they're doing. If you must do it yourself, do not take shortcuts. Leger lines must be perfectly spaced. Accidentals in chords should be in the right order. Spacing of rhythms within the bar should be sensible (this is also a very frequent problem with computer-produced scores). Sharps, flats and naturals should look unmistakeably different from one another. Noteheads should be big enough to read. Stem lengths should be constant and the stems should be straight; so should beams joining eighth-notes and smaller. Text should be legible and the music should be given extra space to accommodate text rather than the text being squashed. If at all possible the text should be in just the original language but if you must give a singing translation please be consistent about which way round the languages appear.
This may all seem obvious but you would be amazed how consistently these rules are broken by very well-respected and well-known composers. The most infuriating thing as a repetiteur is that the orchestral score and parts are almost always produced by computer and are legible, but then the vocal score is done by hand - do repetiteurs and singers just not complain loudly enough? I find it mildly scandalous that we should have to sit there counting spidery leger lines while the better-unionised orchestral players get computer-prepared parts.
Computers are not the solution to everything, of course, and they bring their dangers too. You can always tell an amateur whose music is mostly brought to life by the playback algorithm of his notation software by notation that is technically correct and perfectly readable to a computer, but for a human brain much harder to read - see rules #1 and #2 above, for starters.
That said there are also aspects of how the mind processes information that are more computational than hand-written scores give them credit for. Most of the things I mention in point #4 cause difficulties not because it isn't obvious what's meant - of course we still know what four sixteenth-notes are when the beams joining them aren't quite straight. But the mind is much better than we realise at processing information subconsciously and when things are neatly, predictably and mathematically presented it can get on with this without having to take up too much conscious thinking power. When things are comprehensible but require the brain to engage a conscious analysis circuit, it makes it much harder.
I could go on and on but I think you get the idea. When I see the parts that we are mostly presented with for new music my usual first reaction is: is he not ashamed? Do his cheeks not burn with the disgrace of such unprofessional work? Does he not recoil in fear of what his colleagues will think of him for producing this? And then as I am forced to accept that the composer must in fact be sleeping perfectly well or he would do something about it, I think: well, sod you, then. If you cared that we play the right notes rather than just making it up you would produce decent parts, so perhaps you just don't. I feel insulted that somebody who probably walked of with tens of thousands of euros for this is happy to let me struggle along reading this spider scrawl.
And then in the end, because I'm a professional and a perfectionist and a soft touch, I sit there sweating it out and learn the music properly all the same and I resolve never to play anything by that composer again.
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