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    Score Reading: A Key to the Music Experience
    Score Reading: A Key to the Music Experience
    Score Reading: A Key to the Music Experience
    Ebook303 pages1 hour

    Score Reading: A Key to the Music Experience

    By Michael Dickreiter

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    About this ebook

    Score reading provides insights into the musical structure of a work that are difficult to obtain from merely listening. Many listeners and amateurs derive great pleasure from following a performance with score in hand to help them better understand the intricacies of what they are hearing. This guide includes practice examples of increasing difficulty taken from scores of well-known works from various periods.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRowmanLittlefield
    Release dateMar 1, 2003
    ISBN9781617748936
    Score Reading: A Key to the Music Experience

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      Score Reading - Michael Dickreiter

      instrument.

      2 Types of Scores

      A score is a systematic arrangement of all parts of a composition, both vocal and Instrumental. The Italian word for score is partitura, meaning division or arrangement. The individual parts are arranged on the page in such a way that tones heard simultaneously are notated exactly above and below each other. Vertical dividing lines going through all or most parts are the most obvious aspect of this arrangement; they facilitate the precise alignment of simultaneously sounding tones. Bar lines later developed from these lines.

      Today we distinguish among various types of scores according to function. These types include simplified versions that do not reproduce all voices or instruments hut are easier to read and more useful for certain purposes.

      For rehearsing and performing a conductor uses a full score. This is the standard score and usually the first one Printed. It came to be called full to distinguish it from a study score printed in a smaller format. The large size of a full score leaves room on the paper for notations by the conductor. The large print also accommodates the greater distance from the conductor’s eyes to the score lying on the music stand—greater than that of a hand-held score read from a sitting position.

      Study scores, also called pocket scores, are widely used today. Their smaller size makes them more convenient and less expensive to produce; therefore, they have become popular with students and amateurs (see figure 1). A study or pocket score is as complete as a conductor’s full score; it is produced by a photo-mechanical reduction in size. Small-sized scores already existed in the early nineteenth century, as shown by early editions of some Beethoven. symphonies, but the publishing of pocket scores became widespread around 1900. Ernst Eulenburg in Leipzig was an early publisher. Since then, small-sized scores of piano and chamber music have also become popular.

      1. Relative sizes of full score and study score (Beethoven, Fifth Symphony)

      Before the time of recordings, most music, especially operas and symphonies, was studied at the piano. For this purpose, publishers provided piano reductions or vocal scores, for operas, oratorios, and so on. These reduced scores continue to be used today for study and rehearsal purposes.

      Full scores also exist for electronic music, but their appearance is radically different from traditional scores. They consist chiefly of technical instructions concerning the various sound generators. Such scores are rarely suitable for following the music, and they are seldom published in quantity. (One reason for publishing is to establish copyright.) Simplified scores using some traditional symbols occasionally are issued after the work has been produced.

      Attempts have been made to reduce the difficulty of score reading for untrained listeners. Some scores contain only the parts for a small group of singers or players within a large ensemble; the other parts appear either in a piano reduction or are omitted altogether. Such scores may show only the vocal parts of a work for soloists, chorus, and orchestra. To facilitate following a composition, publishers have experimented with melodic line scores in which only the line that is most prominent at a given point is printed. Such reductions, to be sure, can no longer be considered scores and hardly help in developing score-reading skill.

      Piano scores and vocal scores became increasingly important in the nineteenth century as the piano was perfected and ever more widely used. A piano score is a reduction of an orchestral score, including all its essential parts or lines. Often the names of instruments prominent at a given moment are printed above the music. If a large orchestral score is condensed this way, playing it requires great pianistic skill, though an experienced pianist can simplify the task by quickly seeing which notes can be left out. If a work includes solo or choral singing, those parts usually are printed in their entirety above the piano reduction, which then becomes a vocal or piano-vocal score. Vocal scores are widely used, but printed piano reductions of orchestral works are rare today. Instrumental solo concertos are commonly available in editions giving the complete solo part plus a piano reduction of the orchestral accompaniment. Such an edition of a violin concerto would be called an edition for violin and piano.

      Today vocal scores are essential for rehearsing major works for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra. It is to a singer’s advantage to be able to follow the entire work, even while he or she has an extended rest. Figure 2 compares a measure from J. S. Bach’s St. John Passion as it appears in a full score and in a vocal score. The full score includes first and second oboe, first and second violin, and viola. Then, at the bottom of the page, are organ and continuo, the latter here consisting of cello, string bass, and bassoon. In the vocal score these parts are condensed in such a way that the pianist’s ten fingers can reproduce them all. The words Violins (without flutes) refer to the full scoring, meaning that in an earlier, similar passage two flutes doubled the violin parts. Here the pianist would play the first violin part with the right hand, the bass line (organ, second violin, and viola) with the left hand.

      2. Full score (top) and vocal score (bottom) (J. S. Bach, St. John Passion)

      Major symphonic works also were published in arrangements for four-hand piano. Original keyboard music for two players already existed in Mozart’s time, and an 1845 picture by Adolph von Menzel shows his daughter and son seated at the piano, playing four-hand music (see figure 3).

      3. Adolph von Menzel: The Artist and His Family (1845)

      Piano and vocal scores were first issued around 1750, but it was not until about 1830 that lithographic printing methods made it possible to market large printruns and reduce the price of a score. Some famous composers, especially Liszt, prepared piano scores (and free arrangements) of works by other composers. But today’s music lovers are more likely to familiarize themselves with a composition by listening to a recording while following a full score or pocket score rather than a piano score.

      3 The Look of a Score

      Parts, lines, brackets

      Most orchestra instruments are melody instruments whose parts are notated on a single line or staff. String instruments, although basically melody instruments, can also play chords and occasionally do so in orchestral music. But even a violin part that includes chords is notated on one staff. Instruments that require two lines or staves are the celesta, harp, piano, and xylophone, among others.

      To save space on the score page and improve legibility, the parts of two or more instruments sometimes are written on one staff. Publishers usually combine two similar wind parts, such as two flutes or two oboes, but rarely two string parts. If the parts for two instruments share one staff, and at one point they play the same notes, the notes will have two stems, up and down, or carry the notation a 2.

      In orchestral music, each string part is played by several players, whereas each wind part has only one player. Thus a small orchestra may have six first violins, all playing the same music; a large symphony orchestra may have sixteen or, rarely, as many as twenty-four. Sometimes a string part, such as a violin part, may be divided so the players at the first stand have different notes from those at the second stand, or the two players

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