From: mgresham@dscatl.UUCP (Mark Gresham)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: Re: How to read orchestral scores?
Keywords: scores, orchestra
Date: 17 Dec 92 23:05:40 GMT
Reply-To: dscatl!mgresham@gatech.edu
Organization: Digital Systems Co,  Atlanta, Ga

In article <BzA0ts.GIx@news.cso.uiuc.edu> al21146@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Richard Feynman Albert LiFeynman ) writes:
>
>  I have a few questions on how to read orchestral scores.
>1.  How can a person read a whole page of notes at once and knows how it
>  sounds? I can read a Bruckner symphony with relative ease due to its
>  block structure. I need the music on and I can not read all the lines
>  at once. I need to follow the melody. A complex Mahler symphony is too
>  difficult to read for me.

It is difficult for most anyone to read, for that matter, if you
mean "sit down and sightread."
  There are people who can look at an orchestral page and casually
say, "that sounds good." :-)  Truely, they can.
  However, I think your putting a great amount of expectation upon yourself
if you think that by "leap of skill" you will suddenly develop the ability
to read an orchestral score.
  Frankly, it takes practice and experience.
You can learn both score-reading and analysis at the same time, however.
My first introduction to orchestral score reading began in my early
teens when a young associate conductor for the Atlanta Symphony agreed
to teach me conducting lessons.  I would have to assemble a class of four
students for the lessons.  The actual "conducting" part of the lessons
involved four rotated tasks.  One student conducting, one observing,
and two at the piano keyboard reading to four-handed piano FROM THE
OPEN ORCHESTRAL SCORE!  If you can imagine what an experience this was
for a 14-year-old, you might get the flavor of the task set before us.
However, we were asked to play what we could, and what was most important
was that we had to make decisions (sometimes spontaneous) as to what to
play.  This while someone conducted us.
  While all of that seems daunting, there are some basic steps that
can be followed in order to prepare for that sort of thing.  We learned
that conducting was hardly "waving the stick" because you were "the boss,"
but required a great deal of work.  One major part of that involves
score-reading and study.
  If you have any keyboard skills, you should begin by purchasing
a Barenreiter edition of Bach chorales in open score.  This edition
has in the back the "reductions" to two staves, treble and bass.
Ignore it; don't even look at it.  Read instead the open scores in
the first part of the book, which are in various C clefs (soprano, alto,
and tenor) and the bass in bass clef.  Ignore the issue of speed.
if you have to learn the parts one at a time, then fine; you'll find you
"know them" better when all is said and done.   Then put two parts
together, however slowly you must do it; paly all the permutations
of two part combinations: soprano and alto, soprano and tenor, soprano
and bass, alto and tenor, etc.  Then do three parts at once, likewise
in all permutations, and finally four parts.  If you have few keyborad
skills to start with, these Bach chorales will help you get into score
reading as you develop them.
  You can do the same with orchestral scores, beginning with scores
that pose interesting but not insurmountable analysis problems.
  For example, the slow introduction to Beethoven's Symphony #1.  Yes,
just those few bars, as well as getting from them into the downbeat
of the Allegro.

>2. Is it possible to self-train in score reading? Almost all my musical 
>  knowledge I know I learned on my own, by reading books and trial and error.
>  If this is so, what is the proper way to do?way 

Well, I've given you a beginning.  If you haven't studied a basic
orchestration book (to understand both the instruments and their
idiomatic natures) as well as Gardner Read's book on notation
(for notation idiomatic to a particular instruments or families of instruments)
then you should concurrently study both.  (Can't read orchestral score
if you don't know how an instrument transposes normally or in a
given historical circumstance.)

>3. In order to do serios musical criticism on interpretation we must learn to
>  read orchestral scores. Is this true? This is the feeling I get from listening
>to classical music for the past nine years.

1) depends on what you mean by "serious" -- in all meanings, it can't
hurt, and
2) only if orchestral music is the music you want to study :-)  (There
being plenty of chamber, choral, solo, etc. music out there worthy of
serious musical criticism or interpretation.)

>
>  Thank you for your messianic instruction!
>
>Al
>al21146@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu

Work on it slowly, Al.  Take a score and read only the contrabass
part, for example, or the first clarinet part, or whatever, and
study each part thoroughly.  You'll be amazed at how that increases
your ability to read (and understand) the entire score.

Cheers,

--Mark Gresham

dscatl!mgresham@gatech.edu

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