The Orchestral Bassoon was originally designed using Squarespace Version 5. The original “Empire” template was modified heavily using various HTML and CSS code injections, allowing for each individual part and score to be viewed with the associated recorded examples on the left-hand side of the page. The most prominent third-party inclusion was the OrbitZoom JavaScript picture viewer, which allowing users to view each page of the facsimile scores in a zoomed-in view. The current 2.0 version of The Orchestral Bassoon is built on Squarespace Version 6.
The size and orientation of all parts, scores, and autograph scores were edited with Adobe Photoshop CS5. Since some of the scores were quite old and repeatedly used by students, it was also necessary in many cases to remove additional markings made in pencil, colored pencil, or pen. Many of the parts were poorly printed, with some brand new parts resembling the clarity of a photocopy of a photocopy. This frequently resulted in a poor black and white image after being scanned into the computer at high resolutions, often featuring a great deal of unreadable blemishes or distracting "background noise." Due to this, a large number of the images were touched up in Photoshop in order to remove blotches that could be easily be mistaken for staccato markings, or to fill in note heads that were barely visible. For an example of what a typical part would often look like before and after these touch-ups, see Example 3.2 and Example 3.3 below. And, as discussed in Determining the Accuracy of Printed Editions, many of these parts were also altered in Photoshop to match the correct scores.
Example 3.2. Stravinsky, The Song of the Nightingale - 2 bars before Rehearsal 19 to Rehearsal 19, original scan
Example 3.3. Stravinsky, The Song of the Nightingale - 2 bars before Rehearsal 19 to Rehearsal 19, final cleaned version
There were a number of steps involved in putting the audio files from the CDs and LPs onto the website. CDs were transferred to the computer as WAV files using iTunes, while LPs were transferred to the computer as WAV files using an Ion iPTUSB turntable in conjunction with EZ Audio Converter software.1 The individual excerpts were then extracted to 256 kbps MP3s using Audacity. Before exporting these files, the gain (volume) of each was first increased; this step was especially important for soft passages which are normally very difficult to hear in the actual recordings, such as the contrabassoon solo in Ravel’s Mother Goose. The MP3s were then given fade-ins and fade-outs using MP3 Trimmer,2 and these final audio files are presented on the site using the internal audio player.
All musical examples were written in Finale, and then edited and resized in Photoshop. The fingering charts were also created in Photoshop, using photographs of my own bassoon as the original template. Kostka & Payne’s Tonal Harmony3 was referred to for any questions that arose during my harmonic analyses, and the 7th Edition of Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers4 was consulted for all citations and bibliographic entries.
1 Each LP was also first cleaned using the RCA RD-1006 Discwasher Vinyl Record Care System kit.
2 This step could also be done in Audacity, but I found MP3 Trimmer to be much easier and quicker when dealing with large numbers of files.
3 Stefan Kostka and Dorothy Payne, Tonal Harmony: With an Introduction to Twentieth-Century Music, 5th ed.(New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004).
4 Kate Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers, 7th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).