Sheet music
Like its analogs – printed books or pamphlets in English, Arabic, or other languages – the medium of sheet music typically is paper (or, in earlier centuries, papyrus or parchment).
In most classical music, the melody and accompaniment parts (if present) are notated on the lines of a staff using round note heads.
The singers and musicians of that era were expected to know what tempo and loudness to play or sing a given song or piece due to their musical experience and knowledge.
In the contemporary classical music era (20th and 21st century), and in some cases before (such as the Romantic period in German-speaking regions), composers often used their native language for tempo indications, rather than Italian (e.g., "fast" or "schnell") or added metronome markings (e.g., = 100 beats per minute).
Like popular music songs, jazz tunes often indicate both the tempo and genre: "slow blues" or fast bop.
Examples include the blind 18th-century composer John Stanley and the 20th-century songwriters Lionel Bart, Irving Berlin and Paul McCartney.
Sight reading ability is expected of professional musicians and serious amateurs who play classical music, jazz and related forms.
Scholars and others have made transcriptions to render Western and non-Western music in readable form for study, analysis and re-creative performance.
Extra small staves are sometimes added at certain points in piano scores for two hands to make the presentation more complete, though it is usually impractical or impossible to include them while playing.
While piano scores are usually not meant for performance outside of study and pleasure (Franz Liszt's concert transcriptions of Beethoven's symphonies being one group of notable exceptions), ballets get the most practical benefit from piano scores because with one or two pianists they allow the ballet to do many rehearsals at a much lower cost, before an orchestra has to be hired for the final rehearsals.
Piano scores of operas do not include separate staves for the vocal parts, but they may add the sung text and stage directions above the music.
Piano-vocal scores serve as a convenient way for vocal soloists and choristers to learn the music and rehearse separately from the orchestra.
The comparable organ score exists as well, usually in association with church music for voices and orchestra, such as arrangements (by later hands) of Handel's Messiah.
This is the most common kind of written music used by professional session musicians playing jazz or other forms of popular music and is intended for the rhythm section (usually containing piano, guitar, bass and drums) to improvise their accompaniment and for any improvising soloists (e.g., saxophone players or trumpet players) to use as a reference point for their extemporized lines.
Fake books that contain only the chords are used by rhythm section performers (notably chord-playing musicians such as electric guitarists and piano players and the bassist) to help guide their improvisation of accompaniment parts for the song.
This type of notation was first used in the late Middle Ages, and it has been used for keyboard (e.g., pipe organ) and for fretted string instruments (lute, guitar).
[3]: 25 Over the first half of the 20th century, lyrics to songs were printed and sold individually, in collections on newspaper-sized sheets, combined into booklets, and in magazines.
[3]: 30 Through the efforts of the Music Publishers' Protective Association and law enforcement, as well as the advent of legal song sheet magazines, song-sheet bootlegging ended in the early 1940s.
The earliest form of musical notation can be found in a cuneiform tablet that was created at Nippur, in Sumer (today's Iraq), in about 2000 BC.
This process was aided by the advent of mensural notation, which also indicated the rhythm and was paralleled by the medieval practice of composing parts of polyphony sequentially, rather than simultaneously (as in later times).
The psalter was printed in Mainz, Germany, by Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer, and one now resides in Windsor Castle and another at the British Library.
The greatest difficulty in using movable type to print music is that all the elements must line up – the note head must be properly aligned with the staff.
In this format, each voice-part for a collection of five-part madrigals, for instance, would be printed separately in its own book, such that all five part-books would be needed to perform the music.
Copper was the initial metal of choice for early plates, but by the eighteenth century, pewter became the standard material due to its malleability and lower cost.
[9] Plate engraving was the methodology of choice for music printing until the late nineteenth century, at which point its decline was hastened by the development of photographic technology.
With stronger copyright protection laws late in the century, songwriters, composers, lyricists, and publishers started working together for their mutual financial benefit.
An extraordinary number of East European immigrants became the music publishers and songwriters on Tin Pan Alley-the most famous being Irving Berlin.
The late-19th century saw a massive explosion of parlour music, with ownership of, and skill at playing the piano becoming de rigueur for the middle-class family.
Some scorewriter computer programs have a feature that is very useful for composers and arrangers: the ability to "play back" the notated music using synthesizer sounds or virtual instruments.
While a scorewiter program's playback will not contain the nuances of a professional orchestra recording, it still conveys a sense of the tone colors created by the piece and of the interplay of the different parts.
