Elastic scoring is a style of orchestration or music arrangement that was first used by the Australian composer

Percy Grainger Percy Aldridge Grainger (born George Percy Grainger; 8 July 188220 February 1961) was an Australian-born composer, arranger and pianist who lived in the United States from 1914 and became an American citizen in 1918. In the course of a long an ...

Purpose

This technique of orchestration is used to provide composers with the option of allowing a diverse group of voices or instrumentalists the ability to perform their music.""Grainger, Percy."
by

Malcolm Gillies Malcolm George William Gillies Member of the Order of Australia, AM (born 23 December 1954) is an Australian Musicology, musicologist and linguist, who served as vice-chancellor (education), vice-chancellor of City University London, City Unive ...

and David Pear, Grove Music Online An example of this is when a composer or arranger provides extra sheet music parts so a flute quartet (four flutes) can play the same piece as a group comprising two flutes, alto flute and bass flute, resulting a choir-like sound. In other words, a subtle re-engineering of the original work. This technique involves making extra and/or interchangeable musical parts which provide substitutions for more or fewer musicians depending on what is required for an individual performance. This also allows a musical work to be played in smaller communities where the required instruments may not always be available. One of the main tenets of elastic scoring is that the new arrangement preserve as much as possible the original interval relationship (to the closest octave) between notes while not being overly concerned with

timbre In music, timbre ( ), also known as tone color or tone quality (from psychoacoustics), is the perceived sound quality of a musical note, sound or tone. Timbre distinguishes different types of sound production, such as choir voices and musica ...

(tone colour) or number of instruments. Timbre is the

aspect of music Music can be analysed by considering a variety of its elements, or parts (aspects, characteristics, features), individually or together. A commonly used list of the main elements includes pitch, timbre, texture, volume, duration, and form. Th ...

varied most through changing instrument or number of instruments.

Techniques

Besides providing alternative instrumentation in the form of sheet music parts, the elastic scoring concept allows three subsets of scoring music.

Lateral scoring

Lateral scoring can be said to have occurred when a piece of music is set for one or more instruments from the original number of instruments. An example of this is if a piece of music set for flute and piano is re-scored for clarinet and piano. In this instance, the intervallic relationships remain the same, but the tone colour has changed.

Expansion scoring

Expansion scoring is a style of arranging or orchestration that lets composers and arrangers enlarge the original work from a smaller score to a larger one. An example of this is when a string quartet is expanded to become a piece for string orchestra.

Contraction scoring

Contraction scoring lets composers and arrangers reduce the original work from a larger score to a smaller score, such as when an orchestral work is reduced to

piano The piano is a stringed keyboard instrument in which the strings are struck by wooden hammers that are coated with a softer material (modern hammers are covered with dense wool felt; some early pianos used leather). It is played using a keybo ...

part. The resulting piano score is more commonly known as a

piano reduction In music, a reduction is an arrangement or transcription of an existing score or composition in which complexity is lessened to make analysis, performance, or practice easier or clearer; the number of parts may be reduced or rhythm may be ...

Composers/Arrangers who use elastic scoring

(1882–1961), Australia/United States * Michael Blake (born 1961), South Africa

References

Literature

External links

"Harvest hymn"
(1940) by Percy Grainger, for elastic scoring (2 instruments up to massed orchestra, with or without voices) at the

National Library of Australia The National Library of Australia (NLA), formerly the Commonwealth National Library and Commonwealth Parliament Library, is the largest reference library in Australia, responsible under the terms of the ''National Library Act 1960'' for "mainta ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Elastic Scoring Musical notation Musical terminology