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

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(More customer reviews)This book belongs in the hands of every aspiring orchestral musician, conductor, and avocational music-lover. Ambitious high-school students and conservatory undergraduates will especially appreciate the clarity and concision with which Dickreiter (through Pauly's fine translation) illuminates the labyrinth of abbreviations, symbols and page layout details for deciphering orchestral scores.Best of all, the book answers most basic questions about instrumentation (including foreign terminology, clefs and transpositions), performance practice and history, without forcing the reader to hunt down the information in several other sources.
Musicians searching for practice material in reducing scores at the piano will not find it in this book, but they will find a handy reference with a sound review of orchestral history and instrumentation. Aspiring conductors will find a valuable introduction to their craft and all readers will appreciate the clarity of the text which conveys information without the baggage of elitist condescension or that chatty hand-holding which bloats many mass market "how to" or "dummies" books.Several of the score examples employ a format (found in the Norton Scores) that highlights prominent melodic lines with gray shading. This illustrates the dynamics of score reading very clearly for novices.
The chapters are as follows: 1) Introduction, 2) Types of Scores, 3) The Look of a Score, 4) Scores and Their History, 5) Reading a Score - Hearing a Score, 6) Examples for Practicing Score Reading, 7) Orchestras and Conductors, 8) Instrumentation and Score Reading: Suggestions for Further Reading.

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Product Description:
Score reading provides insights into the musical structure of a work that are difficult to obtain from merely listening. It can enable one to determine the accuracy of a performance, or comprehend the use of specific instruments. Score reading is a practical skill for musicians of all types; it is essential for a conductor who has to direct a performance, and is routinely covered in musical studies. In addition, many listeners and amateurs derive great pleasure from following a performance with score in hand. Following the score helps them to better understand the intricacies of what they are hearing and thus appreciate it all the more.
Using a warm, yet no-nonsense approach, Score Reading: A Key to the Music Experience demystifies and explains the subject. It informs about the various types of scores and their uses, about their historical development, about the visual appearances of various kinds of notation, about the techniques of following a score, and about orchestras and their conductors. There are practice examples of increasing difficulty taken from scores of well-known works from various periods. The reader may have recordings of these popular pieces, or can easily obtain them. All in all, this is a useful book to all interested in playing music or listening to it.

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