Score Study from the Inside Out

“You have to study scores.” You’ve been told this, no doubt by some respected person. The statement was likely accompanied by a knowing nod of the head to which you reflexively responded. And it’s true; we really do have to study scores if we genuinely wish to understand how to create, or to recreate, a piece of music in such a way that it communicates intelligibly and with emotional power.

The trouble is that once you’ve heard such advice, you may not feel like you know anything more than you knew before you heard it! You may wonder: OK, but how do I study scores?

In examining pieces submitted for publication consideration, one of the most frequent issues that I notice is limited experience of texture. Many inexperienced writers seem to struggle with handling so many instrumental voices in a cohesive way.

There are innumerable ways to study a score, but for any of them to be useful, we have to have a way to take the first step, to enter into the sonic world of a musical score. Perhaps I can offer that tangible first step, whether you want to write music of your own or to understand a piece of music in order to teach, rehearse, and perform it more effectively. In my college teaching career, I included an exercise that proved to be useful for my beginning conductors and that I believe would benefit writers in the area of texture, as well as of other musical elements.

I suggest that you start by doing a kind of “reverse engineering” in which you create a piano score, reducing the texture of the daunting full score to its essential content. This will help you to understand how the composer expanded core musical ideas to create an engaging orchestration for a large ensemble.

First, choose a score. Find a piece that you admire, at the level of difficulty appropriate to the players you want to write for. (For conductors/teachers: a piece you would like to conduct.) Then, create a two-line score (treble and bass). You can do this on a notation program, but I encourage you to write your score by hand. It doesn’t have to be perfect by any means; the only person who needs to be able to read it is you! But research on note-taking in class has demonstrated that writing by hand reinforces memory more deeply than does keyboard entry. I am confident that the same is true with musical notation.

If it is a long piece, and the process I suggest seems overwhelming, then choose a section of a few pages. Anything will help, and you will get better and faster at it as you proceed. Just take it one step at a time.

Try these steps:

Notate the outermost voices. The bass is always the lowest voice, whether it’s low enough to be in the bass clef or not. The highest sounding voice (the soprano) is often the melody, but not always. Deciding when they are one and the same is a something you will learn to do as you proceed.
FInd the inner voices, and notate them. The key here is to look for unison rhythms. Lines that have the same rhythm might be in unison, or they might be chords that move together.
Most of the pieces you find will be present SATB textures, like a standard choral ensemble. However, many pieces—mostly easier ones, but not always—will be SAB, and sometimes there may only be one voice, even in the most complex work. In most cases, composers use changes in textural density as a way to create variety for the listener, so don’t be surprised if your piece doesn’t slavishly follow a 3- or 4- voice texture.
You will rarely find textures of more than four voices in any but very complex works. If there seem to be more than four lines, it’s quite possible that one or more of the basic voices has been harmonized, so the texture appears “busier” than it is at its most basic level.
As you proceed, you may need to revise your understanding of the texture. For example, maybe what you thought was a tenor line is really a doubling of the bass at the octave (or, less frequently, a 10th or a 6th, or even a 5th, if the composer is going for a medieval sound, or rock-style “power chords.” (There is nothing new under the sun.)

Once you’ve finished the piece, or the section you have decided to do, you will have learned a lot about how a score is “built.” And you can apply what you’ve learned to nearly every score you encounter (or write). A big score can seem overwhelming, but with a strategy for approaching it, you can begin to understand it from the inside, so to speak.

To maximize your learning process, play your condensed score at the piano. Even if you have quite limited keyboard skills, playing very, very slowly, or playing only a part of the texture, will deepen your understanding.

Once you have gone through this process, you will not only possess a much richer understanding of the textures within the score you have examined, but you will have gained knowledge that you can transfer to other scores, and to your own orchestration efforts.

I hope you have found this helpful. If you have questions, please email me at bhedits44@gmail.com. I’ll be happy to respond. Best of luck!