Description
Book SynopsisBehind Bars is the indispensable reference book for composers, arrangers, teachers and students of composition, editors, and music processors. Supported by 1,500 music examples of published scores from Bach to Xenakis, this seminal and all-encompassing guide encourages new standards of excellence and accuracy.
Trade ReviewIf books, like hotels, had a star-rating system then this book would be off the top of the scale! Among the technical reference books it’s colossus. It’s a book for composers, arrangers, copyists, typesetters, and anyone who interacts in any way with music notation. If you want to know how to write it clearly and unambiguously, this book will tell you.
With this book by your side any chance of inaccurate, lazy or impractical notation becomes quite impossible. But it’s not only a useful book, it’s also a fascinating one, and it’s going to become my bedside reading for many months to come.
I couldn’t begin to list the areas that it covers: there are far too many of them. As a clarinettist I headed straight for the woodwind techniques section and learned lots on multiphonics, harmonics and how to note unusual modern performance practice ideas. Each area is accompanied by appropriate and generous musical examples from the widest of repertoires – there are evidently over 1,500 examples.
Simon Rattle, in his munificient introduction, rightly calls this a reference for musicians for decades to come. He also describes the book as part of the living texture of music itself rather than a book of dry rules. He’s right.
Music Teacher Magazine, April 2011
Table of ContentsSection I - General Conventions: Ground Rules; Chords – Dotted notes – Ties; Accidentals and Key Signatures; Dynamics and Articulation; Grace Notes, Arpeggiated Chords, Trills, Glissandos and Vibrato; Metre; Tuplets; Repeat Signs; Section II - Idiomatic Notation: Woodwind and Brass; Percussion; Keyboard; Harp; Classical Guitar; Strings; Vocal Music; Section III - Layout and Presentation: Preparing Materials; Score Layout; Part Preparation; Electroacoustic Music; Freedom and Choice
