What is a Score?

A score is a representation of sounds using visual symbols. Learning to read and write music is no different from learning to read and write a foreign language.

Music notation is a sonic blueprint, like this blueprint that tells a shipbuilder how to build a ship:

Or you can think of it as a sonic roadmap, like this visual map of the SUNY-Broome campus. The symbols of music notation — lines, bars, staves, notepads — tell you in what direction to go, how far, and how fast.

Some unusual scores

A heart-shaped score by 15th-century French composer Baude Cordier:

Makrokosmos Book I: The Magic Circle of Infinity by George Crumb (1972)

Aria by John Cage (1957)

Which can sound like this (it is a sort of guided improvisation):

Helicopter String Quartet by Karlheinz Stockhausen (1995)

It sounds like this:

Here are two examples of scores by American composer and jazz player Anthony Braxton: