Score
Score, musical notation for a multipart composition, in which the music to be performed by each voice or instrument is written on a separate staff, all the staves being aligned one above another. A full score shows the music for all the instruments; the individual musicians are given separate "parts," which show only the music for their particular instrument. Until about 1225, all European music for more than one part was apparently circulated in complete scores, and performers read from these scores. The use of such scores was abandoned in the 13th century for reasons of space. Full scores came to be employed once more during the late 16th century with the rise of the orchestra and the development of orchestration.
The earliest printed score was for voices, a book of madrigals by the Flemish composer Cyprien de Rore (1516-65). The first printed orchestral score was for one of the earliest ballets, the Ballet comique de la reine (The Queen's Ballet Comedy, 1581), by the Franco-Italian composer Balthazar de Beaujoyeux. Various methods of arranging parts in a score were employed through the middle of the 19th century. Contemporary composers, however, generally follow the standard orchestral division of the instruments into four groups, or choirs: woodwind, brass, percussion, and stringed instruments. Within each group the instruments are arranged according to their tonal range. Reading a modern full score is a skill that is acquired usually through extensive training; it is complicated because of the use of different clefs and transpositions in notating the parts of different instruments. For convenience in reading or study, scores are sometimes arranged in various compressed forms. In vocal scores, for example, the vocal parts are given in full, but the orchestral parts are arranged for the piano; in piano scores, all parts are arranged for the piano.
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