Capital-M Music

Music Theory Guides

Sonic Forest - Notation Trees

by Richard Bruner

This is a follow up guide to a point I raised in my Life Tips guide under Philosophy of Music Theory Tip No. 3 (How to Read a Score). I mentioned near the end of that tip that you need to be careful when trying score reading and orchestration study not to “miss the sonic forest for the notation trees” - my cute paraphrase of a tip I got from one of Alan Belkin’s guides. He recommends listening to pieces several times without the score before you ever look at the score and writing down what you hear to make sure that once you start looking at the score, you don’t miss the obvious sounds because you are distracted by visually striking notation.

One of the sometimes frustrating things about playing in orchestra, at least on violin and viola and I would imagine on many other instruments, is that most of the technically challenging passages you have to practice a lot are background texture lines that most people in the audience won’t even notice sonically. They add to the texture, and if you demonstrated a passage with and without that part, people would notice the difference, but people will be (and should be) listening to some other part, not the part you are struggling valiantly to play. Most of the time, the melody or featured line isn’t the hard part!

One passage that jumps out to me in the repertoire I’ve played to date is a passage near the end of “Jupiter”, movement 4 from Holst’s The Planets suite. I could pick any number of passages from different pieces, but this one will do to start with, particularly from a score reading perspective. Below, I’ve put two videos, both cued to the same spot in the music. Watch the first one first, with video of the players. If you want, you can even write down what you hear (in words, not in notation - though feel free to try that if you want!). Think about who has the melody, and then what else is going on around it. By the way, this isn’t supposed to be a trick question (that’s the whole point of this exercise) - just listen and decide what you think. Then watch the one with the score (this passage starts in the last two bars of the right page in the score video). When you look at the score video, you should see what I’m talking about with the difference between what the score looks like and what you hear most clearly. I’ve put my analysis in the accordion tab below the videos. Click or tap to expand it, but do the exercise yourself first.

(Here’s the PDF for the movement (IMSLP), and the webpage for the full suite if you want to follow along that way - but listen to / watch the version without the score first. We’re starting on pg. 109 in the score).

Once you’ve done that, go back and listen to the whole piece, as it’s a really cool piece all around - this suite is one of the orchestral scores that hooked me on studying orchestral music when I was first getting into score reading in Jr. High!