- The design of the score will tell you a lot about what the composer thinks about choirs and orchestration. Design your own score-paper for the piece in particular. Never use the standard set up while composing. Because it signals the way you want to organise the choirs, what you want to be choirs for the piece. Afterwards, you can put it in a standard score to help the conducters read your music.
- Never write repeats, not in the score, nor while composing. The repeat will miss it’s oppotunity to surprice a little with small alterations. It will be boring.
- Give the conductor the right feeling for a passage by adjusting the lay out of the score. Slower passages must seem longer and less dense than faster passages. Also the length of the bars must be adjusted. Do the same for the parts of musicians.
- Scoring for percussionists: Make it clear from the parts how the percussino is organised (See ‘instrumentation/percussion’). Also the set up on stage must be clear from their documentation.
- Percusionists want as few pause-bars as possible with notated rythms instruments that they can hear properly from their location.
- When writing complex rythms: You can write lines over the silences when they are part of a triplet. This is easier to read.
