Score study – flip through it like a magazine

Recently I started looking at Brahms’ 3rd Symphony. I’ve heard recordings of it, but I’ve never really studied the score. So I started studying the score.

One thing I always do when beginning to study a score is flip through it a few times. Flip through it like it’s a magazine. Imagine it’s just pictures and look at it that way. No audiating the melodies. No singing the parts to yourself and imagining what they sound like. Just flip through it. Look at what’s there first. Notice things.

I had a conducting professor at Berklee who would have us do this with the scores we studied. He’d ask us what we saw. And the answers he wanted were often very simple. For example, “I see eighth notes”, or “I see staccato dots.”

“I see a trumpet solo.”

“I see mezzo-forte.”

“I see an accelerando.”

“I see arco.”

He literally just wanted us to say out loud what we saw in the score. As if we’d never seen music before and didn’t know what it meant.

That single thing helped with conducting so much. It gets you familiar with all of the different markings. And if you’re looking at an orchestra score that’s often 20 or more instruments, which means lots of markings.

It gets you more familiar with the music on the page and what needs to be played.

We went much farther studying the music, but that was always the first step; flip through it like a magazine.

That gave us the foundation to look at things like form and harmonies and melodies and themes. We knew the music really well. We could locate different pieces of the music in the score, almost as if we were memorizing a book.

It got us acquainted with the music just as a piece of music. That way when we analyzed it we could remember the different parts of the music.

It also helps when conducting because you know exactly what’s coming next. You know the upcoming sections before playing them.

Almost as if you can imagine the whole entire piece of music in your head.

Now that takes quite a number of different flip throughs, but eventually you get there.

So now that’s how I always start looking at pieces of music. If I’m learning them for a musical or if I’m learning to direct them with an ensemble. I flip through it like it’s a magazine.

ISJ