# Reconstructing "lost" score from audio recording



## 13hm13 (Oct 31, 2016)

York Bowen's "lost" Symph. 3 might be a good candidate for a modern recording or live performance.






Anyone know of examples of any such attempts (successful or not) of any composer or work? How hard is such an undertaking? 
(Sorry: I have no academic or prof. background in music, reading music or orchestration)


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Like you, I lack any substantial musical background (though I have heard a tune or two in my day), but I suspect that any competent composer/arranger could effectively render this particular recording into a viable score which is, for the most part, accurate to the original, though I suspect a few details of harmonies in tutti (full orchestra) passages might differ a touch from the original. I believe composers have worked from films for which the original scores were lost and rendered new versions just from listening to the music. I'm sure others here know more about that than do I.

But we have orchestral scores from Bowen, including the First and Second Symphonies, so any composer/arranger who would undertake to create a score of this Symphony No. 3 (and thank you for the link -- I'm listening to the piece right now) will have access to scores which will reveal many of Bowen's preferences, especially for chord arrangements in those tutti passages.

I hope someone will undertake the project.


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## 13hm13 (Oct 31, 2016)

I'm pretty sure that modern audio-analysis software can decompose a music signal into notes. So some of the fundamental work can be automated. But devil is in the detail (nuances) ... and that will have to have human eyes and ears and judgement factored in. There is no escaping rolling up sleeves ...

One of my fave symphonies is Barber #2. Supposedly the composer, frustrated by it, destroyed all copies sometime after the last "official" recording (1950). But that Lp (and tape) was widely avail. And in the 1990s, an escaped copy of the score was also found. IMO, it's a phenomenal symph, equal to Barber's #1 ... and it has been recorded several times by major orchestras and mid-level labels (Naxos, Chandos). 
So I'm all in for such projects!
As far as Bowen 3, it's worth it for the Lento mvt. alone:


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

There is a bit of that in the film world. Studios have destroyed a lot of [mainly Golden Age] sheet music that continues to exist only as recordings. When something is of particularily high quality, sometimes a reconstruction is made by specialists such as John Morgan.


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

Fabulin said:


> There is a bit of that in the film world. Studios have destroyed a lot of [mainly Golden Age] sheet music that continues to exist only as recordings. When something is of particularily high quality, sometimes a reconstruction is made by specialists such as John Morgan.


I've done this.

I had to reconstruct a score for a musical of which the rights were simply not available at the time. Painstaking and slow (not that I'm very fast at notation in the first place).

I simply extracted each instrument's part measure by measure, rewinding and playing, rewinding and playing. However, the musical was not scored for a symphony orchestra, but for a pit band.

There are likely people out there for which this would be a simple task.


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## mikeh375 (Sep 7, 2017)

SONNET CLV said:


> Like you, I lack any substantial musical background (though I have heard a tune or two in my day), but I suspect that any competent composer/arranger could effectively render this particular recording into a viable score which is, for the most part, accurate to the original, though I suspect a few details of harmonies in tutti (full orchestra) passages might differ a touch from the original. I believe composers have worked from films for which the original scores were lost and rendered new versions just from listening to the music. I'm sure others here know more about that than do I.
> 
> But we have orchestral scores from Bowen, including the First and Second Symphonies, so any composer/arranger who would undertake to create a score of this Symphony No. 3 (and thank you for the link -- I'm listening to the piece right now) will have access to scores which will reveal many of Bowen's preferences, especially for chord arrangements in those tutti passages.
> 
> I hope someone will undertake the project.


Pretty much spot on Sonnet CLV.


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## Taplow (Aug 13, 2017)

In my teens I got a scholarship to attend a high school with a specialist classical music program. In our music theory classes, we had training in melodic and harmonic dication as well as interval training and, to some degree, orchestration. In fact, it was drilled into us at regular intervals and we were tested on it. These are the tools you need to do this kind of work and I've done it successfully on several occasions, albeit only with smaller-scale works with no more than 5 or 7-part harmonies. I was about 14 when I did it the first time – A transcription of several works for 4- and 5-part recorder consort which I loved from one of my father's LPs of David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London. I still have those transcriptions and have more recently been able to compare them to copies of the original, renaissance manuscripts. I think I maybe found one or two notes that were incorrect or missing. Not too bad.

I can only imagine that if one were to be schooled at a music conservatory or university that such training would be more rigourous still, and one would thus have the tools necessary to tackle more complex works. It would also depend on the quality of the recording and the availability of other tools to isolate frequencies and formants, thereby focusing more closely on parts of the orchestra.

But, as pianozach has said, it then just becomes a matter of painstakingly and slowly working through the piece, rewinding, playing, isolating, listening … either to individul instruments, sections, or phrases at a time.


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## mikeh375 (Sep 7, 2017)

Taplow said:


> .........I can only imagine that if one were to be schooled at a music conservatory or university that such training would be more rigourous still, and one would thus have the tools necessary to tackle more complex works. It would also depend on the quality of the recording and the availability of other tools to isolate frequencies and formants, thereby focusing more closely on parts of the orchestra.


True, although for my alma mater, the focus was more on aural training as such rather than listening to full pieces with a view to transcribing. That allied to knowledge in other disciplines such as orchestration and harmony etc added up to fluency in transcribing.
I was glad of the skill in professional life as I had to transcribe on several occasions and not just orchestral music. In actual fact, I'm doing it at present as I'm transcribing some old classic pop songs I like and arranging them for piano.


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## Guest (Dec 23, 2020)

pianozach said:


> I've done this.
> 
> I had to reconstruct a score for a musical of which the rights were simply not available at the time. Painstaking and slow (not that I'm very fast at notation in the first place).
> 
> ...


I had do this sort of "exercise" too a few years ago, for my youngest daughter's school. The nursery teacher handed me a CD of her favourite Christmas songs (a mix of all sorts of ensembles from orchestra to solo voice and guitar) and asked if I could make a piano version of them and to be the pianist for her end of term Christmas concert. 
I did that but it was a fair bit of work getting it transcribed into Finale. I had transcribed everything at pitch but when I turned up for the first "rehearsal" (if you can call a class full of over-excited 5 to 6 year-olds a rehearsal) I discovered some of my arrangements were too high or too low for their voices. Anyway, one good feature of Finale is that you can transpose a transcription via any interval and print it off, which saved the day!


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## 13hm13 (Oct 31, 2016)

I'm not a composer nor can I read/write music, and am only marginally acquainted with music theory (You Tube tutorials!!). I'm not sure how a composer "sees" (imagines) a project. I'm sure it's a highly varied process -- as it evolves (temporally) .

So, perhaps, someone like Mozart wrote a symphony as if here were taking dictation from God -- that's the urban myth, anyway. While with LvB, it was a messy, iterative process. In the case of the Bowen "lost" score, I'm going to assume a major obstacle a reconstruction process is the low fidelity of recording. Basically, a 100+ piece symph. orchestra transcribed (and played back) in low-fi mono. Hence, hard to pick up on nuances and subtleties.


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## NoCoPilot (Nov 9, 2020)

There are trained musicians, and a few savants, who can play back music on an instrument (such as a piano) after hearing it only once or twice. From that step to notating it would be a snap, for someone fluent in notation.

The Bowen recording above is not great fidelity, but it's certainly legible. Edible? Distinguishable? What's the right word?


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## NoCoPilot (Nov 9, 2020)

13hm13 said:


> One of my fave symphonies is Barber #2. Supposedly the composer, frustrated by it, destroyed all copies sometime after the last "official" recording (1950). But that Lp (and tape) was widely avail. And in the 1990s, an escaped copy of the score was also found. IMO, it's a phenomenal symph, equal to Barber's #1 ... and it has been recorded several times by major orchestras and mid-level labels (Naxos, Chandos).


Oh my goodness YES!!!! I just downloaded the Barber #2 from Naxos based upon your recommendation. I'd never heard it before. Gollleee geee -- why would anyone want to destroy a work of that majesty? It's *magnificent.*

Thanks for the recco.


Wikipedia said:


> In 1942, after the US entered World War II, Barber joined the Army Air Corps; there, he was commissioned to write his Second Symphony, a work he later suppressed. Composed in 1943, the symphony was originally titled Symphony Dedicated to the Air Forces and was premiered in early 1944 by Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Barber revised the symphony in 1947 and it was subsequently published by G. Schirmer in 1950[10] and recorded the following year by the New Symphony Orchestra of London, conducted by Barber himself.[11]
> 
> According to some sources, Barber destroyed the score in 1964.[12] Hans Heinsheimer was an eyewitness, and reported that he accompanied Barber to the publisher's office where they collected all the music from the library, and Barber "tore up all these beautifully and expensively copied materials with his own hands".[13] Doubt has been cast on this story, however, on grounds that Heinsheimer, as an executive at G. Schirmer, would have been unlikely to have allowed Barber into the Schirmer offices to watch him "rip apart the music that his company had invested money in publishing".[14] The score was later reconstructed from the instrumental parts,[15] and released in a Vox Box "Stradivari Classics" recording by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Schenck in 1988.


And of course the marvelous DDD Naxos recording from 1998 by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Marin Alsop conducting. Not a bagpipe in sight!


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## 13hm13 (Oct 31, 2016)

NoCoPilot said:


> Oh my goodness YES!!!! I just downloaded the Barber #2 from Naxos based upon your recommendation. I'd never heard it before. Gollleee geee -- why would anyone want to destroy a work of that majesty? It's *magnificent.*
> 
> Thanks for the recco.
> 
> And of course the marvelous DDD Naxos recording from 1998 by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Marin Alsop conducting. Not a bagpipe in sight!


Yes, that Naxos with Alsop is the best version of Sy 2 I've heard t odate. It's even better than Barber's self-conducted 1950 recording. 
BTW: I have that Naxos/Alsop on CD, which has sy 1, too. Not bad but. But ultimate Barber 1 is Zinman/Baltimore (Argo, 1992). Now if Zinman would've done Sy 2, wow that could've brought down the house! In any case, a lotta potential for future projects in Barber 2.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

NoCoPilot said:


> There are trained musicians, and a few savants, who can play back music on an instrument (such as a piano) after hearing it only once or twice. From that step to notating it would be a snap, for someone fluent in notation.
> 
> The Bowen recording above is not great fidelity, but it's certainly legible. Edible? Distinguishable? * What's the right word?*


Perhaps "aurally lucid" or "coherent".


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## NoCoPilot (Nov 9, 2020)

"Audible"?:tiphat:


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