From the course: Learning Music Notation
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Notating vocal music
- [Instructor] In previous chapters and videos our discussions about notating music has largely focused on instrumental music. Vocal music has the additional challenge of adding lyrics into a space already compromised by staff, notes, expression, dynamics and articulations. Vocal music features different practices in stem direction and beaming, as well as expression, dynamic and articulation placement. So before we discuss notating lyrics, let's take a look at how to notate the actual music. So the first thing that we run into with vocal music, and especially kind of historical scores and manuscripts, is that primarily the stems all went up, so if we look at this first staff here, we've got a tenor vocal part here, and we know that because of the lyrics being present. We can see that all of the stems are going up, and when we get to the top of the staff, it starts to look a little bit ridiculous. So contemporary practices allow the stems to go both directions, and down here we can see…
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