Great for getting notation nits right

books:


	• Music Notation (Crescendo Book) Gardner Read Taplinger Publishing Company, 1979 - 482 pages average customer review:based on 19 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great for getting notation nits right

Not for the newbie. Not because it's hard to read--it's not. But when you have the basics of music notation well in hand, there are a host of detail questions about getting those little nits right. For example, if you have a phrase where the last two notes are tied, and you want to slur the phrase, does the right end of the slur go over the FIRST tied note or over the SECOND? And if you have 13 notes to a quarter note, do you notate those as 16ths or 32nds? Questions like these are far from academic--in a commercial performance situation (e.g. studio) ease-of-reading because your score is consistent with standard notation practice translates directly into fewer reading errors = save $$$. At any rate, I keep just a handful of reference books in ready reach by my music workstation, and Read is one of them.

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Amazing

This book was absolutely amazing. A little outdated in spots, but it is the guide to freedom in notation. As a new-to-the-block composer, this books has reaffirmed the basics of traditional notation and served as a guide to advanced notation. This is a fun read and a great reference. Notation is everything to a composer, so read this book!

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Extremely Useful Book

This is one of the most informative and INTERESTING books I've ever read concerning the subject of musical notation. It goes into the history of notation and shows the evolution of how it began to where it is now, and where it is going including newer experimental notational methods. I won't go into detail as previous reviewers have done a great job of that, but even if you never write a single note of music, there is much to be gained by reading this book. What I like most is the critical detail of EXACT procedure when notating music by hand. Computerized music notation programs do all the notating details for you and the composer who relies solely on these programs for musical notation are not understanding what it is that they are doing. This book clearly explains, using plain English, how to go about the task of hand-writing music with many, many examples and even tests to see if you understand what you are learning. I have a degree in Music and I have learned more from this book about music notation than I ever did in music school.

I can't say enough good things about this book and it is my favorite music notation book so far. I have several others.

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Some Historical Perspective

I had two courses with Prof. Read in the mid-1960's, and of course his notation book was required for both.

He was everything the negative reviewers say: pretentious, overbearing, and condescending. He was also a fantastic teacher, meticulous and extremely demanding.

In those days, remember, there were no desktop computers and software to write and print music. Everything, even printed scores, was hand-written and -engraved. Part of the music school experience was learning to write manuscript correctly, legibly and uniformly. In this Prof. Read and his book were indispensable.

Interestingly, in this age when textbook prices are rising faster than the price of gasoline, this edition of Prof. Read's book is *half* the price of the original trade paperback that i bought almost forty years ago.

Are there better books now? Probably. And in this computer age, there's a question whether books like this are even necessary. But this is a classic of its kind, and should be on every music student's, composer's, arranger's and copyist's (if ther are any left) desk.
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Notation Standards

I bought several other books to find what this book clearly states on how to notate music for any instrument. This is the one to own if you want to accurately put your music on paper.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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