Sheet Music / Printed Music

Modern sheet music notation (also known as ‘Printed Music’) now comes in many different formats including the recent invention of digital sheet music (available free to download illegally as well as legally for a fee), often downloadable and printable in the .PDF Portable Digital Format. It can be argued that at least in the Western world there is the beginnings of a move away from the paper book format. Sheet music is different to Tablature (a.k.a Tab or Tabulature) which is another form of musical notation, which tells players where to place their fingers on a particular instrument rather than which pitches to play. This is a popular form of sheet music for beginners learning to play guitar.

If a piece of instrumental music is intended to be performed by more than one musician, each performer will play from a separate piece of sheet music, called a part.

Sheet music is issued as individual pieces or works (e.g. a pop song or a Mozart symphony) or in collections (e.g. works by one or several artists)

When the separate instrumental and sung parts of a musical work are printed together, the resulting sheet music is called a score. A score usually consists of musical notation with each instrumental or vocal part in alignment vertically (meaning that concurrent events in the notation for each part are arranged orthographically). The term score is also used to refer to sheet music written for only one performer.

Sheet music comes in a variety of formats:

• A full score contains the music of all instruments and voices in a musical composition lined up in a fixed order.

• A miniature score is like a full score but smaller in size.

• A study score is often the same size as (and often indistinguishable from) a miniature score, except in name. Some study scores are octavo size and are somewhere between the size of full and miniature scores. Study scores can include extra information about the music and markings for educational purposes.

• A piano score (a.k.a. piano reduction) is a transcription for piano of a piece intended for many performing parts, e.g. orchestral works; this can include purely instrumental sections within large vocal works (see vocal score below).

• A vocal score (a.k.a. a piano-vocal score) is a reduction of the full score of a vocal work (e.g. opera, musical, oratorio, cantata etc.) to show the vocal parts (solo and choral) on their staves and the orchestral parts in a piano reduction (usually for two hands) underneath the vocal parts; the purely orchestral sections of the score are also reduced for piano (without the spoken dialogue). If a portion of the work is a cappella, a piano reduction of the vocal parts is often added to aid rehearsal (this often is the case with religious music).

. A choral score contains the sung parts without accompaniment.

. An organ score contains staves for the sung parts and reduces the orchestral parts to be performed by one person.

. A ‘vocal selection’ is a collection of songs from a given musical.

• A short score consists of a edited version of a work for multiple instruments to just a few staves.

• A lead sheet contains only the melody, lyrics and harmony, using one staff with chord symbols placed above and lyrics below. It is commonly used in pop music to capture the essential elements of song without specifying how the song’s arrangement or performance.

• A chord chart or "chart" contains next to no melodic information but provides detailed information on harmony and rhythm. This is the most common kind of printed music notation used by professional musicians.

Article Source: http://www.articleopus.com

Gary Tallon wrote this article for Voodoo E-Commerce on behalf of Sheet Music / Printed Music

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