Music

Behind Bars is the indispensable reference book for composers, arrangers, teachers and students of composition, editors, and music processors. In the most thorough and painstakingly researched book to be published since the 1980s, specialist music editor Elaine Gould provides a comprehensive grounding in notational principles. Behind Bars covers everything from basic rules, conventions and themes to complex instrumental techniques, empowering the reader to prepare music with total clarity and precision.

Material Cultures of Music Notation brings together a collection of essays that explore a fundamental question in the current landscape of musicology: how can writing and reading music be understood as concrete, material practices in a wider cultural context?

Music Notation is authoritative in every respect: written by a teacher and composer of international reputation; devoted to every phase of modern practice in the subject; concisely presented against a minimum historical background; all terms are defined upon first use. The text describes and illustrates not only the elements of notation common to all forms, but idiomatic notation for instruments and voices as well. It offers detailed guidance concerning music manuscript writing and the preparation of score and parts.

Stone is undoubtedly one of the world's leading authorities on contemporary music notation and its problems. As head of the Index of New Musical Notation, he collected and categorized the myriad new devices appearing in published music of this century. In collaboration with professional performers and conductors, he evaluated these devices in order to determine their effectiveness in practical application. At the International Conference on New Music Notation 1974, a consensus was sought from the eighty participating musicians from eighteen different countries. The results have been incorporated into this volume in the clearest and most direct way. Traditional notation is given detailed treatment, constituting, as it does, the basis for many of the innovative devices. The book is organized to facilitate the location of specific information and for easy reference. A minutely detailed index is provided as an additional and indispensable tool.