Orchestras and Opera Editing and Proofreading Services

Twelve hundred people are in the hall and perhaps forty of them can read a score. The programme note has about four hundred words and eight minutes of interval to work in, and it will decide whether the other eleven hundred and sixty spend the second half listening for something or waiting for it to end. Most notes are written as though the reader had already done the reading.

We edit what orchestras, opera companies and concert presenters produce — programme notes and synopses, season brochures and concert descriptions, surtitle and translation text, audience guidance and first-time visitor information, education and outreach material, funding applications and reports, donor and sponsor communications, and player and production documentation. Our editors work on writing that meets an audience once.

The programme note is the orchestra's only sustained conversation with its audience, and its failure is an essay that describes a work in terms only somebody who knows it would use. Nobody has ever been helped by being told a symphony is in sonata form. We work through these so the note gives the listener something to listen for and tells them when it will happen, since "a haunting second theme" is unlocatable and "about four minutes in, the horns take over the tune the cellos have been playing" is an instruction; so any technical term that survives is doing work and is explained in the clause that follows it, because an unexplained word costs the reader the next sentence too; so the biographical material is included only where it changes what is heard, given that a composer's illness is interesting and the year they moved house is not; so the structure is described in terms of what changes rather than by section names, as an audience notices a shift in mood or a return of a tune and does not notice a recapitulation; so opera synopses are written to be read in eight minutes and to be followable in the dark, with the character relationships made clear before the plot; so first-time attenders are told the things nobody says aloud — when to clap, how long it lasts, what happens at the interval; so the note is honest about a difficult work rather than defensive; and so it is written to make somebody want to hear the piece again. Notes written this way build an audience.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including programme material, season plans and unpublished documents. We are editors rather than musicologists or musicians, and we offer no view on repertoire, interpretation or performance. What we can do is give an audience something to listen for.