Music Video Lesson: How Much Should You Mark Up Your Score?

Welcome to livingpianos.com. Robert Estrin here. The question today is how much should you mark up your scores? You miss something in your music and you want to circle it. Maybe you would need to put fingering in and after a while, your whole score could be marked up and it could be difficult to see the notes.

Here's an interesting story for you. Years ago when I was at the Manhattan School of Music, I had a friend who was a piano major and she had the Henley editions of the Beethoven sonatas, which are very authoritative and very expensive edition. I was helping her with this particular Beethoven Sonata and I said, "Take out the music." She opened up the score of this incredibly expensive, thick volume of Beethoven and she turned to the sonata that she was working on with her teacher there. It was marked up in several different color pen markings.

So much so that you absolutely could not see the score anymore. Things were circled and big blotches of red, green, blue. All these different colors ink on the score. I thought can you imagine the injustice of this? The score was destroyed and there's no way that you could passively see the notes anymore and the Beethoven markings. So that's an extreme example of what to avoid.

The first thing I do with all of my students, when I tell them to mark something in their score, I first ask, "Do you have a pencil handy?" So that's rule number one, only use pencil in your scores. Now my father used to have this really cool mechanical pencil and I haven't seen nothing like it that exists anymore. It was a pencil that had four different color leads in it. So he could mark scores with red, green, blue and black, and it was such a tremendous way for him to mark scores in a coherent fashion. Yet because it's pencil, the markings can be erased.

Now, why is this so important? Well, early on, maybe you didn't see a flat in the key signature. So you put the flat in front of the note. Then maybe later there was something else in that same measure that a fingering or a phrasing. So you start having circles and marks and before you know it, it's not calling itself to your attention. So you want to be able to erase marks that you no longer need and only have the ones that are pertinent.

For example, at a later stage of learning a piece of music, you might want to record it to see what kind of shape it's in. In doing so when listening back on the recording, you might want to gently circle the places where you want to review places you missed. But maybe they were just one-offs. Maybe there weren't places you missed before, but you just wanted to reference them after listening to the recording, but not something that permanently you want to call to attention every time you're looking at the score.

Now, fingering is a really critical example because you may work out a fingering and think this is a good fingering. Later when you're playing the piece up to tempo you realize that fingering isn't going to work at all. As long as it's in pencil, you can erase and put new fingering in there. So that's the most important thing, use pencil and don't obliterate your score with too many markings. Erase the ones you no longer need so you have clarity of the actual score, which is what you need to see and digest. You won't want to obscure it with too many markings.

I'm interested in how you deal with markings in your scores, what you find helpful. Again, I'm Robert Estrin. This is livingpianos.com, your online piano resource. You're welcome to subscribe, ring the bell, the thumbs up. I appreciate all the comments. We'll see you next time.

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