July 1998

Organizing Your Scores

Up until now I've written about playing techniques, but I would like to shift the focus for a short time to other aspects of performing well. The first of these topics will be on how to organize your scores.

I often see people playing with scores consisting of multiple loose pages. There are many practical problems with this approach. First, you always have to make sure they are in the right order. Also, if you are lining up the sheets on a table or a music stand, you have to take care to make sure that the sheets don't overlap each other and hide the music. This can be often happen in the middle of a piece, especially if you have to move pages around while playing. Either one of these problems can and do happen during a performance, making all your practice wasted. Even having to find and arrange all the sheets before each time you practice a song is a waste of valuable practice time.

Instead, I recommend binding your scores together. It's not difficult at all. Use any method you like (stapling, sewing, etc.) to bind your sheets together in order. You might have to do some cutting and pasting, such as if a single phrase starts on one page and ends on another.

If your sheets are bound together, there can be no misplacing, misordering, or covering up of sheets. You can count on predictability, which makes it easier to concentrate on playing Add a cover sheet with the name of the piece and everything is complete.

Of course, if you play outside there's a chance even bound scores might fly away. So, the best thing to do is still to memorize your music.