I like the color-coding! I'd recommend recruiting one of those guys that does score reductions (people on YouTube do them mostly with film music), and Vyacheslav Gryaznov.
5 months ago
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This is awesome and some serious work! Question, why not start with the piano vocal score and work from that template rather than the full score?
5 months ago
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I'm a bit reticent about the convenience of writing precisely all that the voices sing, and about respecting the register where the voices are written (specially when they are being doubled by instruments). Some vocal parts don't seem to have much sense if played by an instrument. About the range of the voices, it's related to the way we perceive them, which is different from the way we perceive instrumental sounds. It may lead to some unpractical doublings too. Anyway, it seems an interesting work, and I'm looking forward to listen to the result.
5 months ago (edited)
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Eric Xi Xin Liang
Working on reducing Turandot, Act 1 (one of Puccini's most famous operas) to solo piano right now.
Trying to make sure everything is as close as possible to the sound of the original orchestration and vocal expression, and while it's surprisingly doable 90% of the time, I do have to perform some relatively insignificant trade-offs here and there to make it playable.
Anything you see in the LH (and sometimes RH) that looks impossible to play because there is a greater-than-10th interval is either arpeggiated, briefly interrupted (in the case of a sustained tremolo), or split by grace notes. All vocal lines are represented by diamond-notehead detached-beam notes. When I finish the act -- which is still very far from the case -- I'll fully colour-code adjacent vocals lines to make them completely stand out from the orchestration, since the vocal lines need to be much louder when played: this also makes the performance of this brutally difficult, but I've done way harder throughout my history of performance.
If there is anyone willing to reduce Act 2 concurrently with me with the same reduction paradigms with no deadline pressure, I'd be overwhelmingly willing to perform it. Besides "Nessun Dorma" from Act 3, this is likely the first time anyone is reducing this opera to piano with this degree of conservatism. But do expect that it'll likely take 100 to 200 hours. I'm only 20% through Act 1.
My process is:
1. Mentally transcribe all instruments separately to concert pitch.
2. Mentally filter out redundancies and low-contribution lines. Verify with recordings to make sure.
3. Mentally group rhythmically similar/compatible lines into up to 8 voices (since I'm using Musescore) across 2 staves.
4. Input each voice one-by-one into Musescore, making corrections and further necessary reductions along the way.
5. Visually stylize and organize the voices so it's as aesthetically pleasing as possible.
(If you try playing this on the piano so far, the reduction sounds amazing.)
5 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 50