Here are a few first measures of "Pomp and Circumstance, March 1"'s score:
What puzzles me is that in both the oboe and clarinet staves, we can clearly see two instruments indicated, yet there are instances where only one note is specified. Should this note be played by the higher-voiced instrum...
So the question more specifically is ' why in bar 2, does the last E (oboe) have only a down stem, while clarinet (Bb) has two'? That's more confusing.
Stem directions are not decisive in this kind of score. If one of the two instruments was supposed to pause for one beat, you'd have to write an explicit pause.
@KilianFoth - But isn't it like oftentimes in two- and three-voice notation explicit pauses are avoided, yet implied, in order to maintain a less cumbersome and more readable score?
I expect that the double stem for the clarinet is a typesetting error. Depending on the software being used to format the score, it may be necessary to manually suppress the extra stem, if one feels that it's clearer without it.
@GlennWillen The double stem isn't an error, just superfluous. The missing marcato on that note and the missing tenuto mark in the next measure are errors. As mentioned in another comment the score came from musescore.com, so typeset using musescore. That site is full of sloppily produced music: anyone can upload there and there's no quality control.
@brilliant in keyboard writing implied rests are often omitted. You can't do that if there's any possibility that two people have to play from the same part (e.g. if whoever prepares the parts doesn't bother to split the oboes into two parts).
@PiedPiper not an error in the sense that the music is wrong, just in the sense that the person creating the score meant to remove it, but missed it. (Explaining why it's present, when all the other similar ones are absent.) I think this is confirmed by learning that it was typeset using musescore -- the way you produce this appearance in musescore is to enter all notes for both voices, then manually select and hide the duplicate ones.
@brilliant I just checked the original on imslp.org (a much more reliable source for scores) and strangely enough the tenuto is missing there too. Either Elgar's manuscript was inconsistent or the publisher (Boosy & Co.) messed up.
@PiedPiper - "Either Elgar's manuscript was inconsistent or the publisher messed up" - So you fully rule out the possibility that it was originally intended that way, right?
@brilliant As ElementsinSpace pointed out: the tenuto marks are in the parts but not the score, so a mistake by the publisher (in whichever direction). The upper woodwind parts would all be consistent with the tenuto.
Discussion on question by brilliant: …
Discussion on question by brilliant: …