Tuesday, July 14, 2009

The cheapest rehearsal scores available


I've been cast in a new opera for the fall. This is great except for two things: 1) There's no recording of the work to use for reference, and 2) The score is unavailable to purchase because, well, it's not been published yet. Now that I've gotten my hands on a PDF version of the score, it's time to start learning. But a digital version doesn't do me a lot of good on it's own right now (that's another post for later this week,) so it needs to be printed. Now, I could go to all of the trouble to set up the double sided printing on my printer, pay for ink, and babysit the print job so that nothing goes wrong, but I won't. I sent the PDF off to Staples and they'll print it, bind it, and cover it in six hours for the low, low price of $13. Now, I can't remember the last time I paid $13 for a score that wasn't from a used music sale, and even then the odds of them having what I need at the exact time of the sale is, well,unlikely to say the least. This is a revelation for me. Combine my previous list of downloadable scores with Staples or Kinkos and you have a really cheap option to have rehearsal-worthy scores for a fraction of the price, and all of it legal and guilt free since the only scores posted on the sites that I listed are score versions that have either expired their copyright and are public domain or are covered under explicit personal Fair Use doctrine (like the Mozarteum collection, having expired two years ago). Baerenreiter scores for $25? I'm in!

No comments: