17th August 2008 - by Charlie Buquette
Some Fun Facts on Classical Sheet Music
1. The Library of Congress is known as the
largest library in the world, with more than 138 million items
on 650 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than
5.5 million pieces of sheet music alongside 32 million books
and other printed materials, 2.9 million recordings, 12.5
million photographs, 5.3 million maps, and 61 million
manuscripts stored there.
2. In 1939 the composer Irving Berlin composed
a Christmas song but thought so little of it that he just threw
it into a trunk and didn't see fit to retrieve it until he used
it for a Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire movie, HOLIDAY INN 10 years
later.
Crosby was a staunch Catholic and at first refused to sing the
song because he felt it tended to commercialise the holy
Christmas festival. He finally agreed, took eighteen minutes to
make the recording, and then this "throw-away" song become a
huge hit.
Crosby's version has now sold over 40 million copies. In total,
this song has appeared in over 750 versions, selling 6 million
copies of sheet music and 90,000,000 recordings in the United
States and Canada alone.
You might not know of any songs from the movie HOLIDAY INN or
from the composer's name of Irving Berlin. But you're bound to
know it because it's on the list of Christmas classics: WHITE
CHRISTMAS.
3. There is no sheet music for the diatonic
accordion. Music is passed from one generation to generation to
the next by one on one teaching.
4. A common alternative (and more generic)
term for sheet music is score, and there are several types of
scores. The term score can also refer to incidental music
written for a play, television programme, or film; a.k.a a film
score.
5. Music notation in it various forms and the
way it is distributed haven't changed much over the last half a
millennium. Paper, glue and ink have always been the
traditional method of producing sheet music, but now modern
technology has presented a way to get rid of those shelves full
of paper-based sheet music and tablature and store an entire
library of titles in the space of a medium-sized book with a
product known as the MusicPad Pro Plus. It looks like a tablet
PC but it has one purpose, to store and display digitized sheet
music for musicians.
6. Znamenny chant is a style of music from
Russia which is performed in unison. The name came from the
term "znamena" (meaning marks or signs), which describes the
writing of the sheet music.
7. "Take Me Out to the Ball Game", the
third-most frequently sung song in America, after "Happy
Birthday" and the national anthem has now sold over 10 million
copies in sheet music and / or record form. It was co-written
in 1908 by Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer, neither of whom
had been to a major league baseball game at that point. The
song was purportedly written on a New York City train after
Norworth saw an advertisement for a baseball game at the Polo
Grounds, got inspired, pulled out some paper and wrote those
classic lyrics.
Article Source:
http://www.megamusicsite.com
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