Professional Music Preparation Services

Serving New York City musicians since 1999, Jack Parton has provided music copying, editing, arranging, and printing & binding services to the concert, opera, music theater, cabaret, pop/rock, and jazz communities. Materials produced have been used on stage at Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, Juilliard, Alice Tully Hall, Town Hall, Birdland, and The Metropolitan Room among many other venues; in concert by the New York Collegium, the baroque orchestra Rhetoric, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and the American Symphony Orchestra; on television as part of Live From Lincoln Center, and at the Aspen Music Festival and the Bard Music Festival. Projects have varied in size from song transpositions and arrangements to complete opera and oratorio performance editions.

Peabody-trained as a composer, a professional singer, tubist, and pianist, and drawing on more than ten years’ professional experience as an orchestra librarian, Jack Parton has the breadth of experience to understand the needs of nearly any performing musician. With additional education and background in graphic design and layout, Jack produces scores of the utmost legibility, utility, and accuracy.

Materials are produced principally using the latest versions of Sibelius; other softwares (Finale, Score) are available as well. Using Music XML protocols it is possible to translate scores from Finale to Sibelius and back with minimal loss of fidelity. Hand-copying is also available. Scores and parts can be printed in a variety of sizes and bound by various means, or .pdf files can be prepared which can be sent via email or delivered on CD to be printed by the client locally.

Further services include:

Jack works closely with the client to determine or devise a style sheet that best suits the client’s budget and musical needs. Estimates given are closely adhered to unless the nature or scope of the project changes substantially. Deadlines are met and if at all possible materials are delivered ahead of time.

Please take a look at the PORTFOLIO to see descriptions of some recent larger projects, and some samples of final products.

 

COMMENDATIONS & TESTIMONIALS

 

I have known Jack Parton since 2002, when he first began working as the American Symphony Orchestra's librarian.  The American Symphony regularly performs rare and neglected works.  Many of these, though not recently composed, have often never been performed in the U.S. previously.  Jack's ingenuity in finding either manuscripts, full scores, and sets of parts that in many cases have no current publisher has been consistently remarkable.  It has required dogged determination as well as infinite resourcefulness, often involving diplomatic negotiation with the composer's decendents or with European libraries and archives that perhaps did not even realize they possessed such treasure.  Jack never once failed to locate at least a score of any work that I programmed, no matter how obscure or hidden.  With his help we were able to revive two Russian symphonies by Popov and Schcherbachev that had not been heard since the days of Stalin.  Violin concertos by Kletszki and Ponce, operas by Chausson, Dukas, and Dame Ethel Smyth, and Ferdinand Hiller's majestic oratorio The Destruction of Jerusalem are only a few of the works that Jack located for ASO programs.

But once the works were found and programmed, that was only the beginning.  More often than not, scores would be heavily damaged and parts missing.  At this point Jack put to work his formidable skill and an editor and reconstructor, sometimes recreating entire editions of a work, beautifully copied into Sibelius.  His most recent triumph was the original version of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, supervised by Simon Morrison of Princeton, and performed by ASO as part of Bard's Summerscape Festival.  I had complete trust in the quality and the accuracy of Jack's work on this enormous project, because Jack had already handled over the years even more complex projects involving the reconstruction of choral and symphonic works by Czerny, the original version of Chabrier's opera Le Roi Malgre Lui, the Hiller oratorio, and Bruno Walter's Symphony No. 1.  The pristine parts that Jack created for these works are often the only parts in existence.

Jack also worked on a number of contemporary compositions while at the ASO, including works by Joan Tower, George Tsontakis, Philip Glass, Nico Muhly, and Richard Teitelbaum.  Not only does Jack possess a profound knowledge of music history, but his skill as a musician and composer himself, and as our resident music technologist, have time and again secured the performances not only of this orchestra but of the soloists and composers that have joined us in the these musical explorations.

Leon Botstein, conductor, music director, musicologist

 

Jack Parton is simply the best I know for score and parts preparation.  He is knowledgeable, fast, and does beautiful and accurate work.  He has been indispensable to me on many an occasion.

Lowell Liebermann, composer

 

Mr. Jack Parton is a Musical Magician! If you have a task involving arranging, organizing, locating, or otherwise working with music in any form, he is your man. I have worked with Jack for the past nine years in our collaboration for the Riverside Symphony Music Memory Finals Contest held each May for the elementary school students of New York City. He produces amazing books of music for the orchestra made up of sections of sixteen different pieces from the five major periods of music history, plus his own arrangements of a few designated titles. The Contest is conducted as a live "drop the needle" kind of listening test. This program could not occur without the exceptional skills Mr. Jack Parton brings to his work.

Mollie Tower, music educator, director of Music Memory

 

I'll definitely work with Jack again.  Aside from a seemingly infallible accuracy, his insight into how music is built is an invaluable resource.  He's fast to spot anomalies, and ask if I'd meant "F sharp here when it's F natural most other times?"; he's nearly always right, not an easy feat considering how complicated my music is!  Never have I had someone else be able to look at a score of mine and point out patterns that even I as the composer had no idea were there.

The project I worked on with Jack was the reduction of a large score for orchestra, organ, voices, and electronics to a rehearsal-ready piano score for the singers.  Jack did an amazing job balancing the considerations of what sounds would be most likely to be useful (and audible) to the singers, what would be playable for the pianist (and spent some serious time considering how to spell things for her most intuitively), and devised ways of highlighting events in the accompaniment to make sure the singers knew what to listen for.

Before undertaking the creating of this piano reduction with Jack I believed that I would have to hire singers with absolute pitch if I were to ever get this piece performed. Thanks to Jack's care, rehearsals (with intelligent singers without perfect pitch) went easily and the performance was a triumph.  

Sarah Massey, PhD., composer