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.

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