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Best Classical Tunes
Help
Site Navigation.
Every page in this site has a tree-menu at the left side of the screen, which
permits access to all of the web pages in Best
Classical Tunes. The items marked with a + are expandable by clicking on
the +. For example, if you click on the + beside "Composers", an
alphabetical list of composer names will appear below it. Then if you click on a
composer, such as "Beethoven", an "Opus By Composer" page will be displayed,
containing a brief biography, and a list of the works by Beethoven for which
there is a score or a MIDI file. In turn, clicking on any work title will bring
up a screen with the score, or where no score is yet available, a Media player
control bar which permits you to play the MIDI file.
When any branch of the tree is expanded, a minus sign "-" replaces the "+", and
clicking this will contract the branch.
A similar process applies to Instruments, Periods, Categories, Countries, and
Ensembles. For example, if you have expanded "Instruments" and
selected "clarinet", you will see an "Opus By Instrument" page, with clarinet
information and photos, and a list of available music featuring the clarinet.
This tabular list has sortable columns. For example, if you click on the
"Category" column heading, the works will be listed in alphabetic order by
category, i.e. Chamber Music, then Concertos, then Folk Songs, and so on.
Site Search.
At the top right of every screen there is a panel for searching for a tune in
this web site. You can type in any word or up to 4 key-words. When you click the
button "Search this site", the system will search tune titles and all other text
in the database for these words. If you check the box "Exclude Description", the
search will not look inside tune descriptions. By adding more key words
you narrow the search and generate a shorter list of matches. For example, (at
time of writing) if you type "mozart piano" you will get in excess of 50
matching tunes. If you add the third key-word "trio", you narrow the
matches down to about 18, and if you add a fourth keyword "menuetto" there are
only 2 matches.
The search results are presented in a tabular grid, with the work titles in the
first column. When you click on any title, you are taken to the "Tune Details"
page for this work, which displays the "Scorch" score when available, or a MIDI
media player when the score is not available.
If all you know about a tune is its melody, then you can use the "Tune Lookup
Dictionary" to search for matches.
Tune Details Screen.
This is the most important and fundamental page for this site. For the tune you
have selected it
displays a sheet music score, or else it shows media player controls for
listening to the MIDI file. It also contains a description of the work, and the
database catalogue information, such as composer, category, ensemble, period,
country, and solo instrument when applicable.
This page also lists the themes inside this tune, with a description, starting
bar number, and the first ten notes for each. The dictionary lookup feature of
Best Classical Tunes utilizes the first ten notes to identify a tune. When the
Scorch score is shown, you can use the bar numbers to move to the start of the
theme in the score.
You can download the MIDI file by clicking the blue button "Download MIDI file".
For a small but increasing number of tunes, there is also a Music-XML file which
can be downloaded with the blue "Download Music XML file" button. For most of the folk tunes, and a
few other works, there are MP3 audio files available for download by clicking
the green "Play MP3 using player below" button. These audio files are not usually live
recordings, but electronically-generated ones. However, their sound
quality is of the highest order, especially for small ensembles and solos.
Lastly, for many tunes, a link is provided to an MP3 streamable sound recording
provided by the Classical
Archives web-site, by clicking the large blue square button labelled "Listen to Classical Archives MP3 Recording".
If you already have a subscription to this service, you can hear the entire work
immediately. Otherwise, you can listen only to the first 60 seconds of any
track.
Scores and Sheet Music.
The scores are displayed in the "Tune Details Screen" using Sibelius "Scorch".
This shows the sheet music on the screen, and enables you
to play the music through your MIDI sound system whilst watching the score
advance. Most of our Scorch screens also allow you to
print out the score, or to save it as a Sibelius file, which can be edited later
if you have the Sibelius program.
The menu bar at top of the Scorch panel also has icons to transpose the music to
any key, change the tempo, or change the playback device.
There is a list of tunes which have Scorch scores, reached by clicking the
lowest branch of the menu tree "Scorch Scores". This "List of Scorch Scores"
initially appears sorted into alphabetical order of title, but you can sort it
into any other order, by clicking the appropriate column heading
Tune Lookup Dictionary
Best Classical Tunes has a dictionary of musical themes, which can help you identify tunes you
know, but cannot name. All you have to do is pick out the first ten notes, using
the mouse on a virtual piano.
As you click on each piano key, the note will sound after a slight delay. The
note names are listed in a panel. The rhythm doesn't matter, all you need to do
is play the notes. You may click fewer than 10 notes, in which case the search
will be wider and the dictionary may return more matches. You may click
more than 10 notes, in which case notes after the 10th will be ignored. Once you
have typed the notes, simply click the green button "Look this up".
The system will look up your tune in its database.
It may find more than one tune matching your notes. All matching tunes are
listed as rows in a tabular grid, and you can click on the title in the leftmost
column of any row, to hear the tune and see the score.
This feature, which relies on you carrying a tune in your head, complements the
site search feature, which searches for tunes based on text in titles,
descriptions, etc.
Terms used in this web site.
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Category |
In this web site, "Category" can refer to the musical form, such as a symphony,
sonata or concerto. Or it may describe the music's purpose, as in marches and
waltzes. Or it may be a more general categorization such as folk-song, jazz or
chamber music. |
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Dictionary |
In this web site there is a dictionary of musical themes, which stores the first
ten notes of each theme, fully catalogued by title, composer and so on. It is
used to lookup up tunes played on the virtual piano. |
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Ensemble |
In music, "ensemble" means a group of instruments, such as a string quartet, a
symphony orchestra, or a military band. |
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Hit Parade |
In this web site, the hit parades are drawn up from surveys of the most loved
classical music, voted by listeners to radio stations in Britain, USA and
Australia. |
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Melody |
"Melody" is another word for "tune". |
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Midi |
MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It is a compact system of
electronically encoding musical notes, rhythms, dynamics and instrumentation. It
originated as a means of communication between series of electronic instruments,
such as digital keyboards, synthesizers, sound modules and drum machines. Today
it is also used to store recordings of performance data, such that the music can
be played back from a computer through a sound module. It is a modern
sophisticated version of the old mechanical piano rolls, as it specifies which
notes to sound, how hard to hit them. and for how long to sustain them. When a
MIDI file is played back, the sound quality depends entirely on the
quality of the sound module. |
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MP3 |
An MP3 file is a condensed digital wave file. Original digital recordings take
up vast amounts of disk storage, and they take a long time to be transmitted
across the internet. MP3 files are much smaller, so they can be transmitted
faster, with minimal loss of sound quality. |
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Music XML |
Music XML is a new attempt at standardized encoding of musical notation. A Midi
file only contains performance data. A Music XML file also contains expression
marks, dynamics, techniques such as bowing for strings, and all the other
information typically contained in a printed musical score. It is hoped that it
will become a universal interchange format between the various rival music
notation programs on the market. Sadly, not all the well-known notation program
publishers have fully embraced this format as yet. |
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Opus |
Opus is latin for "work". It simply means a piece of music. It may be divided
into several component parts, called "movements". For most of the great
composers, publishers have numbered off their works in chronological order of
composition. For example, Beethoven's Choral Symphony is his Opus 125. |
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Period |
In this web site, "periods" refer to certain spans of time during which the
style and form of music being composed had many common characteristics. For
example, "Baroque" refers to the period from 1600 to 1750 approximately. |
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Score |
A score is the sheet music for larger ensembles. The largest ensemble is a
symphony orchestra. It contains a musical staff for each group of instruments in
the ensemble. For example, 1st violins, 2nd violins, violas, cellos, and so on. |
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Scorch |
Scorch is a proprietary system for displaying musical scores on internet browser
pages, provided by Sibelius. The developer needs the Sibelius notation program
to create the score, but the client using the browser has no such need. The
music can be played back through the client's MIDI sound card, as the score
advances in synchronization with the music. The music can be transposed, speeded
up or slowed down, or printed out. Best
Classical Tunes uses the Scorch system to display its scores. |
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Song |
A song is a piece of music that is sung by the human voice, as
opposed to music that is played by an instrument such as a violin or piano. In
the world of classical music, a song may be called an "aria" if it is in an
opera, or it may be called a "Lied" if it is an "art-song" typified by
Schubert's Lieder. In the world of sacred music a song may be called a "hymn" or
"anthem" or "carol". Of course, with folk-music, a song is simply called a
"folk-song". |
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Theme |
A theme is a fragment of a tune which characterizes a piece of music. It is
usually repeated many times, and it is often the memorable part of the
work which allows us to easily identify it. The tune lookup feature of Best
Classical Tunes employs the first ten notes of themes, stored in its dictionary,
to permit matching against notes clicked on a virtual piano. |
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Tune |
A tune is another word for a melody. Tunes make the heart and soul of good memorable music.
Best Classical Tunes is dedicated to
providing free access to scores and Midi files of the best tunes in the world.
Many tunes may be embedded inside a single Opus, Work, Piece, or Movement. Some
people, accustomed to today's pop culture, use the word "song" for music that is
not sung, when they ought to use "tune" or "piece" or "work". |
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Virtual Piano |
This is an image of a piano keyboard, displayed on the computer screen, with
click-sensitive zones on each black and white piano key. In
Best Classical Tunes a virtual piano
is used in the "Tune Lookup" page. When the user clicks
with the mouse on a note, such as middle-C, the note sounds, and its name is
recorded in a panel below the virtual piano. After ten or fewer notes have been
clicked, the user may click a button to look the tune up in the dictionary of
musical themes. |
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Work |
Work simply means a piece of music. It may be identified by a work number,
normally called an Opus number, where "Opus" is the latin word for "work" |
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