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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 781.24
EAN: 9780393955262
Edition: 1st
ISBN: 0393955265
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 168
Publication Date: February 17, 1987
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
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Editorial Review:Product Description:The Norton Manual of Music Notation is designed to serve as a practical guide to music handwriting and music-writing procedures. It provides the music student with an essential tool for learning to put notes down on paper with clarity and speed. At the same time, it serves as an indispensable reference to a wide variety of notational conventions. Part I deals with ELEMENTS OF NOTATION, arranged in the order they are found in printed music, i.e., clefs, followed by key signatures, time signatures, etc. For each element, a model, a model is given and, where appropriate, simple drills provided.
In part II, the ELEMENTS ARE COMBINED and the student is introduced to considerations of spacing, changes of meter, clef, and key as well as the notation of syncopation and irregular divisions of the beat.
Part III delineates SCORING PRACTICES ranging from notating two lines of music on one staff to discussions of transposing instruments, orchestral score layouts, and the extraction of instrumental parts.
The author provides an appendix designed for those who wish to achieve more professional results; copying tools, materials, and techniques, as well as popular-music notation are described in detail.
George Heussenstamm is a frequently-performed composer who has prepared his own scores for years. The copying skills he developed enabled him to give very successful courses in music notation at several California universities. The present book is the practical result of his experience as a teacher and professional copyist.
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I believe every composer and musician should learn how to write music down on paper. This book goes over all the rules, and tells you what tools you will need to make your music look amazing. I got this manual about a month ago and I can say my skills have improved. At first, writing it all down can be time consuming, but eventually you will get faster at it, as it is very satisfying. Music notation software has made writing and copying music faster, but in my opinion is dehumanizing the art of composing. I highly recommend this book for any composer and/or musician who wants to further there skills in writing music down on paper.
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Comprehensive and concise. Formatted in such a way as to quickly provide answers to a multitude of questions regarding proper scoring notation. A must for the composers library.
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This book is essentially a primer on the basics of how to notate music by hand, meaning how to draw noteheads, space things, etc. It does not contain information on score layout, terminology, etc. that are also essential to notating a piece of music. For instance, it will tell you how to draw a fermata, but not the common practice rules for how and where it should appear in an orchestral score and parts. Since I was looking more for these specific rules rather than for the basics, I was disappointed with the book.
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I was a composition student at a prominent music school and no, I did not know all of the rules of proper notation even as I was turning out scores. Instead of taking a semester class in music copying, why not get this book? It is the clearest and easiest to use manual on music notation that I have ever seen. You will find the information you need quickly and you will see immediate improvement in the quality of your scores. Believe me, composers and arrangers need all the help they can get. Sometimes musicians won't even play your whole notes unless they look just right, honest! With the new computer programs you may not have that particular problem, but the same issue arises as when a non-musician writes music at his computer. Someone writes a violin piece in bass clef, nobody knows how to bow it, and the number of beats per measure does not match the time signature. The computer can sure write pretty notes, but you still have to know how to put them together properly.
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I found particulary useful the advice about how actually to draw musical symbols, and I enjoyed reading the chapter on "Popular-Music Notation", which really has to do with special notational practices for film, television, and recording session use,--although I happen to have no need for this sort of thing myself.
I have one small objection to lodge, however: the author uses the word "meter" through out to mean time signature. Though the distinction is moot in this context, at this stage of notation, it is important at an earlier stage of notation--that is to say, you need to understand the difference between "meter" and "time signature" in order to decide properly what time signature to use.
The distinction is analogous to that between "key" and "key signature". A key signature of two sharps, for example, tells us to sharp all F's and C's and only implies that we are in the key of D major or B minor. A tonal piece of any length and complexity will at some ...
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