Score Reading: A Key to the Music Experience (Amadeus) - Softcover

Dickreiter, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1574670565 ISBN 13: 9781574670561

Publisher: Amadeus, 2003

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Dickreiter has earned a Tonmeister (sound engineer) diploma from Detmold Music Academy and a Ph.D. from Heidelberg University. He is an instructor at the School for Radio Technique in Nuremberg and the author of several books on sound recording techniques, acoustics and musical instruments.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

It would be difficult to compose polyphonic music (music having two or more parts) without writing it down in a way that shows the relation of the parts to each other. Few musicians are able to put together (com-pose) a polyphonic piece entirely in their heads, without putting the parts on paper to show how they fit together in other words, without a score. A few famous musicians such as J. S. Bach are said to have had that ability; they are the exceptions to the rule.

Historically, even the very first attempts at writing down polyphony represent a kind of score. These documents, dating from the ninth century, are notated in such a way that simultaneous sounds are vertically aligned. Some later medieval manuscripts also have such scorelike arrangements of the voices. In some cases the interpretation is unequivocal; other documents present problems in understanding how to sing the music.

Polyphonic music became ever more widespread during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in fact, the sixteenth century has been called "The Golden Age of Polyphony." Polyphony by that time had become extremely complex and was governed by strict rules of voice leading; composing such music without writing it down in score form is unthinkable. We would therefore assume that many scores would have been preserved in old libraries, but hardly any scores have come down to us. Instead, the music is saved in choir books and part books.

Edition details

• Publisher: Amadeus
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1574670565
• ISBN 13: 9781574670561
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 266