Studying a score.

Dead Chicken -

Many good points made but SSC raised one important point - what is the purpose of your score study?

If it is for the sake of learning score reading, ideally I would start with a work or section of one you like and know well. Nevertheless, I strongly suggest Bartok violin duos -- even if you don't know it well it is pretty accessible, many of the pieces are short but contain much info and you will deal with the treble clef only (goodness I think I should look at those after writing this!!).

Good recording of them has been put out by the ECM label.

Suggestions for studying the Bartok VIOLIN DUOS:

a) Listen for when accompaniment and melody interchange
b) Figure out the scale the melody used
c) If there is a canon study the intervals and where the strong and weak beats are
d) If anything intrigues or catches your ear find it and copy it from the score and play with it -- that is try to do what Bartok did or do it better!
e) Finally remember Gardener's point --- it is fine to have a very open-ended session. Sometimes following along to the best of your ability is fine. If you lose your place try to find it again.

To answer the question of my purpose...
I think the main reason I would study a score is to learn techniques, and the like, that others have used. Ideas that can help me arrange my thoughts easier. (I still don't have a concrete purpose yet...) Something like that...

thanks again..

Originally Posted by Omri Lahav

And the best advice I can give you is don't bother with bad scores.
Only study good scores from good composers and orchestrators.

I disagree with that! I think I have learned a lot more by studying scores or instrumentation exercises by fellow students than by "established" composers. Not saying that those scores were bad (well, some of them were), but I think it can be an advantage not to know beforehand whether, say, the instrumentation is going to be excellent or problematic. Such scores don't invite you to blindly copy everything, but actually make you think for yourself: Is it easily understandable what the composer went for? How is it notated? How does this sound? Will it be practicable to perform? Will the apparent intent of the composer come out? And so on.

With scores written by people you already accept as "masters" you won't ask yourself these questions so much. You will often take for granted that it's a masterful instrumentation and just assume that it will sound good, be effective, be well notated, etc. You won't question it so much.

Sure, you can learn a lot things from great scores, and many things you might never learn otherwise, so it's important to study them. But more ambiguous scores will teach your ability to think critically and to precicely imagine the audible result. Even better if you can actually discuss it with others, or the composer personally. You will copy less, but discover a lot yourself.

Studying bad scores is as informative as good scores. You learn different things from both.

Which is why, if you can, taking a composition class with some experienced amateur composers led by an experienced professional composer and hearing your sketches or pieces performed by an excellent player is possibly the best way to study "bad" scores. BTW - If you look at some of Feldman's scores you would classify them as bad - he aligns instruments in different meters as if they are playing the same meter! A major, major mistake.

Agreed. A major: major mistake.
Agreed on the rest too. (Of course not everybody has these options easily available though, especially if you're not studying composition.)