Methodical mastery of the full score, mental reading, use of piano. Preparing a score for rehearsal and performance.
To the average layman and even a great many musicians, an orchestral score appears to be about as intricate in appearance as a blue print of a complicated engine. The simile of the blue print and the score is not inapt inasmuch as the blue print represents on paper every detail of the mechanical construction of the engine, and, likewise, the musical score is an exact description on paper of every detail of the musical composition.
No attempt will be made in this book to describe the development of the core from the days of the early Italian opera composers who did not even write out parts for the players, to our own time when hardly anything is left to the imagination of the musician, and everything is written in the music. Likewise, the aesthetic interpretation and evaluation of the musical content of the score will be left undiscussed, to make way for the presentation of the practical aspect of a methodical system of learning to read quickly and accurately the mere notes of the score.
It is related that a celebrated professional magician, in order to train his sense of vision, quickness of mental perception and memory, used to practice looking at a show window for exactly one minute and then writing down from memory the name of every article he saw therein. By practice he was enabled to increase the number of articles remembered from a relatively small number to a total which included everything in the window. Now, what the magician did with his sense of vision, quickness of mental perception, and memory is precisely what the musician must do in learning to read the full score.
Possibly the most confusing thing to the beginner in score reading is the increased demands made upon his vision. Accustomed to reading music in one or two staves, the eye is now called upon to comprehend as many as 24 to 30 staves in a glance. At first this seems an impossible task but like many other seemingly impossible tasks it can be accomplished by patient and systematic practice. Of course, every conductor has his own way of mastering a score and the author can only give his personal method. However, this method has been followed successfully by students, and in practically every case has been found successful.
It is assumed that the conductor has some ability in piano-playing. Naturally, the more the better, although it is not necessary to be equipped with the highest virtuoso technic. A knowledge of the scales and arpeggios, the ability to play Bach’s Two and Three Part Inventions and Well-Tempered Clavichord might be considered a working equipment for the conductor. Let it be explained here, that while the ideal of score reading is to be able to read and hear every note of the partitur without the aid of the piano, the value of the use of the instrument in the process of developing this ability and as a constant means of checking and proving one’s capacity is unquestioned.
The best exercise for widening or broadening the sense of vision is to practice the playing of three or more part vocal scores. A collection of early church music such as “Musica Sacra,” published by Peters, contains the most practical material. Herein are to be found in two, three, four, five, six, eight, ten and twelve parts and staves, the lovely old polyphonic works of the early Italian masters and the patient practice on these, always adding one more part, will do much toward the spreading of a sense of vision that has become limited by the habitual perusal of just one or two lines. The absolute independence of each individual part makes these polyphonic choruses highly valuable as practice material.
The second difficulty of the full score is the fact that not all of the instruments are written in the familiar clefs and many of them are transposed into different keys because of their peculiar mechanical construction.