When the paper The “Universal Instrumentation Code”: Bringing Consistency to Orchestral Instrumentation Information by Mark Carroll, Peter Grimshaw and James Koehne (Music Reference Services Quarterly (Volume 17, Issue 1, 2014) was published last year, the UIC was just a theory.
Now that it is in use, getting the best results will require some adjustments to the original specification which I will blog about here from time to time, and the first major addition to the architecture is something I have called a UIC Footnote.
While adding real-world examples from a variety of publishers we have found is that despite the flexibility of the system, there are some situations where just the name of the instrument alone is not sufficient to provide the end-user with all of the information they may need.
The solution was to create a special UIC family called Footnotes. Footnotes are added like any other instrument, but they are never displayed by themselves or used in searches. They are merely a pointer to more extensive information that is embedded in the UIC itself. When exporting a UIC, along with the individual part definitions is a text field that includes a copy of the orchestration in its abbreviated form (in English using a system based on the Daniels format) and also any footnote text (separated by a tilde ~)
To see an examples of a footnote, view these titles in Zinfonia:
http://www.zinfonia.com/zShowWork.aspx?wid=126806
http://www.zinfonia.com/zShowWork.aspx?wid=126807
and click on the UIC icon.
There are a number of different footnote symbols available including:
*º¹²†‡+-#¤§¶
and all of these can be repeated and so footnotes like:
* Footnote 1
** Footnote 2
*** Footnote 3
are also possible.
Some examples of a UIC Footnote include special performance notes, extensive percussion listings or details related to the sections of the work.
It should be noted that Footnotes cannot be automatically translated and are always displayed “as-is”. We recommend you always include an English translation but other languages can be added (usually separated by a slash /) .
Footnotes are not normally included in UIC Barcodes.
Adding a UIC footnote in HLMSW v8