An up-to-date guide to musical notation

• Feb 23, 2024 - 23:02

Does anyone know a complete guide to musical notation that is relevant today (or if it appears in the future)? Over the past century, more than a dozen such manuals have been released, and each of them stood out in some way. I would like to see a modern (and, most importantly, Up-to-date) manual that includes everything related to musical notation, instructions, engraving rules, notation for percussion, design schemes, standard designation of chord symbols etc. Does anyone have information about such a manual? And if it does, then there is a PDF file?


Comments

In reply to by underquark

A widely respected and quite comprehensive authority is "Behind Bars" by Elaine Gould. It covers traditional and some some of the more common avante garde notation. But of course, there are many "out there" notation schemes that will probably never have wide adoption and probably for good reason.

Also, some music publishers provide their "house style guides" which can be useful.

Apart from "Behind Bars", I'm using "GEROU-LUSK - Essential Dictionary of Music Notation". The latter seems to be more"modern" but of I search for specific issues, I go back to Behind Bars.

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