One of the barriers we face in carving out time for score study is the silent and perhaps even tedious nature of the task. We stand a better chance of inspiring students to pursue score study with diligence if we avoid the “have-to’s” and consider it a sport.
Our overarching process is to examine the piece at a level closer, and closer, seeing greater detail, down to the closest note-by-note basis in our musical analogy. Then, we’ll work our way back out to gain perspective until we see the whole again.
For most of the process, score study occurs in silence and our goal has been to see everything that the composer put into the piece – we have “decomposed” it, as though reducing an elaborate meal to its raw ingredients. Next, we turn around and begin to reconstruct the recipe as we work our way back out, adding sound by sound until we have made the performance.
Remember that the ensemble’s rehearsal is the conductor’s performance. Our first rehearsal must be fully fledged, having traveled the full journey of score study to arrive at that moment. What remains of the process for us it to fit the composition to the ensemble and to wrap the ensemble around the composition itself.
Learning the score is not the ultimate goal of our study. Our goal is to make connections and the score/the music is our tool. In order to do this, we hold up the composition and treat the music itself as a frame, not an object. The frame holds a window through which we see a composer in the near or distant past. We see a culture near or far away. Hold it up again and we see that the frame holds also a mirror that reflects our own time and our own cultural image.
(The ACDA National Conference is just one of the many benefits of membership in the American Choral Directors Association. Join ACDA today.)
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