The score

A violinist in an orchestra reads their own line and nothing else. The conductor, facing them, needs to know what the violin, the flute, the horn and the timpani are doing at the same moment. The two read the same music on different pages: the violinist reads the part, the conductor reads the score.

Score and part

The score is a stack of staves, one for each instrument or voice, set one below the other so that you can see exactly what is played in the same bar and on the same beat (Med 1996, ch. XXXVII). It is also called the full score.

The part is an extract of the score holding the notes of a single member of the ensemble, such as the first violin part (Med 1996, ch. XXXVII).

The difference is one of purpose. The part is made for playing: it has only what is needed, and page turns fall where the player has rests. The score is made for seeing the whole: for whoever conducts, studies or analyses the work.

Two staves from a score, a violin melody over a cello line. What is in the same bar sounds together:

Hear the passage

Hear the passage

In a score the two would be tied by the same barlines, and every beat of one would fall exactly over the same beat of the other.

The order of the instruments

In an orchestral score the instruments do not appear in just any order. The symphonic score Lacerda reproduces follows the traditional order (Lacerda 1966, ch. XLII), from top to bottom:

Group	Instruments
woodwinds	piccolo, flutes, oboes, cor anglais, clarinets, bassoons, contrabassoon
brass	horns, trumpets, trombones, tuba
percussion	timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum
keyboard and harp	harp, piano
strings	first violins, second violins, violas, cellos, double basses

Two rules shape the chart. Groups come by family: winds at the top, strings at the bottom, percussion in between. And within each family, from the highest instrument to the lowest: piccolo above the flutes, double bass at the end.

There is one famous exception, and it shows in Lacerda's chart itself: the horns come above the trumpets, although they are lower. It is a legacy of the eighteenth-century orchestra, in which the horns belonged with the woodwinds, holding long notes with them, while the trumpets played together with the timpani.

Knowing the order is what lets you find an instrument on a crowded page without reading the names. Whoever looks for the viola knows it is just above the cellos, near the bottom; whoever looks for the oboe knows it is among the first staves.

Grouped staves

A score joins staves in two ways.

• A bracket, a thick line on the left, groups the instruments of one family: the woodwinds, the brass, the strings.
• A brace, the curly one, joins the staves of a single instrument that needs more than one. It is the brace of the piano and the harp, which use two staves, treble and bass.

Identical instruments can share a staff. In Lacerda's score the two flutes are on a single staff, and so are the two oboes, the two clarinets and the two bassoons (Lacerda 1966, ch. XLII). When both play the same note the score writes a 2; when they play different notes, each follows its own stem.

And to save paper, a page of the score often carries only the instruments that play on that page (Med 1996, ch. XXXVII). Anyone with a long rest simply disappears from it, and returns when they come in.

Words that only exist in a score

When several people read the same music, instructions appear about who plays what. Some of the commonest, with the meaning Med gives them (Med 1996, ch. XXXVII):

Term	Meaning
a 2 (a due)	the same part played by two instruments
divisi, div.	the section splits into groups, each with its own note
non divisi	do not split; play the notes together
col, colla parte	play together with another instrument, or follow the leading voice
V. S. (volti subito)	turn the page quickly

Reduction

A whole orchestra does not fit on a piano, but much of its music does. A reduction is the transcription of a work written for a large ensemble for a smaller one, or for piano (Med 1996, ch. XXXVII).

The piano reduction is what the pianist uses when rehearsing an opera or an oratorio with singers before the orchestra arrives. In it the voices have their own staves and the orchestra is summed up on the piano's two. Med also records the Italian names tied to opera: spartito, the opera score with its vocal and instrumental parts, and libretto, the text (Med 1996, ch. XXXVII).

Reading a score

Nobody reads every staff at once, note by note. Score readers learn to look in layers: first the melody, then the bass, then what fills the middle, and only then the details. A good way in is to follow a single staff while listening to a recording, and gradually widen your view to its neighbours.

Two things get in the way at first. One is the C clef, which the violas use all the time. The other is transposing instruments, such as the clarinet and the horn, whose staff shows different notes from the ones that sound.

What comes next

Transposing instruments are exactly the next step: why some instruments' parts are written at one pitch and sound at another, and how to read those staves in a score.