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Understanding musical scores

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Explore what's involved when musicians create a performance from musical notation in this free online course.

Would you like to know more about what musicians do in rehearsals and performances? Would you like to learn different techniques for listening to and understanding music?

This free course provides a general introduction to how to understand a musical score, and insights into what professional musicians do with the notation that these contain. You'll learn how to connect the notation you see with the music you hear, from short familiar melodies to a full orchestral score.

Focusing on works by Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven and Mahler, we'll introduce you to a pianist, a small chamber group and a conductor who will explain how they create memorable performances from the notes on the page.

Requirements

This course is intended for anyone with an interest in music. You do not need to be able to read musical notation or play an instrument.

Learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

understand the reasons for different musical notations
understand the relationship between notation and performance
navigate printed music
listen to a simple musical example alongside its notation.

First Published: 02/11/2015

Updated: 09/04/2018

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Course content

- week1Week 1: Understanding the principles of musical scores
- Current section:
  Introduction
  Welcome to the course! Over the next four weeks, you will begin to understand how music is written down, what a musical score is and what it does. You will also learn how musicians use and interpret musical scores in their work.By the end of this course you will understand what music notation does and some aspects of how it works. You will be able to understand more about different types of music and how they are written down, and what that notation means.This course includes some musical te...
- 1.1 Types of musical score
- 1.2 Introducing pitch and rhythm
- 1.3 Organising time
- 1.4 Week 1 summary
- References
- Acknowledgements
- week2Week 2: Pianists and piano scores
- Current section:
  Introduction
  Last week, you learned a little bit about the history of Western music notation and you looked at melodies written on a single staff, listening and comparing different elements of the music.You are now going to start combining staves and working towards understanding a typical piano score. You are also going to explore how to follow more than two lines of music at once, whether those lines are both to be played on the piano or by combinations of instruments.In the following video, pianist Al...
- 2.1 Variations on a theme
  - 2.1.1 Getting started with piano scores
- 2.2 Melody and harmony
- 2.3 Some new symbols
- 2.4 Week 2 quiz
- 2.5 Week 2 summary
- Acknowledgements
- Week 2 Quiz
- week3Week 3: Musical collaboration and the role of the score
- Current section:
  Introduction
  Last week, you worked on piano scores that comprise two simultaneous lines of music. You are going to move on to music that uses more than two lines. As you are now familiar with what piano music looks like, you will move on to music for piano with other instruments.To start off this week, watch a performance of part of the fourth movement of Schubert’s Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667, known as the Trout Quintet. You will be studying this piece in some detail this week, so you might...
- 3.1 Working collaboratively with a score
  - 3.1.1 Introducing new genres
  - 3.1.2 Working with instruments
- 3.2 Instrumental colour
- 3.3 Introducing jazz instrumentation and notation
  - 3.3.1 Big band timbres and textures
  - 3.3.2 Putting it all together
- 3.4 Week 3 summary
- Acknowledgements
- week4Week 4: Understanding orchestral scores
- Current section:
  Introduction
  Up to this point you have looked at a variety of music for single instruments and for small groups of instruments. This week you will be looking at large orchestral scores, drawing on the skills you have already learned.Large orchestral scores might seem rather daunting, but in fact you have already looked at a full orchestral score at the end of Week 1, and you’ll revisit Mahler’s first symphony again this week. There are a number of techniques that you have used when you’...
- 4.1 Score order
- 4.2 A conductor discusses: developing a performance
  - 4.2.1 Mahler - what to look out for
  - 4.2.2 Keeping track - Mahler Symphony No.1, third movement
- 4.3 Following a motif
  - 4.3.1 A conductor discusses: interpretive approaches
  - 4.3.2 Double bar
- 4.4 Week 4 quiz
- 4.5 End-of-course round-up
- Acknowledgements

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Your course resources

As you work through this course you will need various resources to help you complete some of the activities.

Glossary File
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Week 1 OpenLearn examples File
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Mozart 12 Variations File
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Week 2 OpenLearn examples File
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Chopin – Prelude no.4 File
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Schubert’s piano quintet File
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Die Forelle The Trout File
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First variation of Schubert’s trout quintet File
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Schubert’s piano quintet – variation III File
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Tchaikovsky’s nutcracker suite – Arabian dance File
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Tchaikovsky’s nutcracker suite – Arabian dance annotated File
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Mahler 1-3 annotated File
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Mahler symphony no.1, 3rd movement File
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Beethoven symphony no.5 File
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Understanding musical scores trailer transcript File
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Understanding musical scores

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