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Score Reading of Orchestral Music

Guide for Conductors and Music readers

Introducing a comprehensive guide to orchestral score reading tailored for conductors, musicians, music readers, and students. This invaluable resource offers techniques for synthesizing scores, creating a sounding image of the score in the mind, reading in clefs, decoding single and multiple transpositions, and creating piano reductions. Accompanied by a rich selection of orchestral music examples spanning the 18th to 20th centuries, this book is now available in both paperback and hardcover editions.

Author: Maja Metelska-Räsänen

Order your copy today from leading retailers such as Lulu, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, directly from the publisher Met-Music Publishing, and through various other bookstores.

What will you learn?

  • Develop fluent orchestral score reading skills
  • Create a sounding image of an orchestra score in the mind
  • Decode single and multiple transpositions with ease
  • Read music written in any clef proficiently
  • Synthesize music from multiple staves effectively
  • Create piano reductions from complex scores
  • Imagine the sounding result of a score

Benefits

  • Imagine how the music will sound. It’s the basis for creating your own interpretation.
  • Acquire efficient and accurate score reading techniques, reducing the time required to learn new pieces.
  • Discover the piece itself from a score, not an interpretation of a piece from a recording.

How?

  • Learn through over 160 excerpts from renowned classical compositions spanning the 18th to 20th centuries.
  • Detailed instructions, explanations, and proposals for piano reductions provided for each excerpt.
  • Explore works by notable composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Franck, Haydn, Liszt, Mahler, Mozart, Ravel, R. Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, and more.

With interest and pleasure I read the book on score reading by Maja Metelska-Räsänen. This is a well-made and interesting work about a topic, which is very important for everyone dealing with orchestral music. The work, not only clearly and distinctively describes every kind of issue connected to this, but also gives interesting musical examples of varied difficulty. This work can be handy for composers, theoreticians, and first of all conductors. It will be especially useful for those, who just now intend to study scores. Score reading is a skill not easy to master, but necessary to thoroughly learn symphonic music. And teaching of this discipline doesn’t have a long tradition in Poland. I wholeheartedly recommend!

Prof. Antoni Wit

About the Author

Maja Metelska-Räsänen

Maja Metelska-Räsänen

D.Mus.A. in conducting, M.Mus in cello, graduate of the Chopin University of Music and of the Sibelius Academy. She has been conducting professional orchestras around the world, symphonic and opera music. For more than 15 years she has been teaching score reading of orchestral music to students of conducting and other music specialities at university level.