Ah, the Fourth of July. Fireworks, crowds at the Mall, parades in 100 degree weather, hot dogs, sunburns...and a ton of music. It's one of the most musical major holidays - parades and marching bands are staples of our celebrations, as is enthusiastically singing patriotic songs with half-remembered lyrics. Here's a handful books of patriotic or American that will help you celebrate America's birthday in style, all with a local connection to Washington DC!

The Greatest American Songbook

This one's pretty no-frills. It's just a great collection of all the most famous patriotic songs, including all of the armed forces songs. The piano arrangements are reasonably simple, and the book also gives chords and a separate vocal line. This is a great book for a sing-along celebration.

Local connection: Includes excellent piano transcriptions of several of the most famous marches by John Philip Sousa, who was born on G St. SE in 1854, conducted the DC-based Marine Band, and is buried in the Congressional Cemetary.

Last week's post talked about formats in pop music, so this week I'm moving on to classical music. Here's a quick guide to the different formats you're most likely to encounter when buying classical scores.

Full score

This is the most complete musical format that you can buy. A full score includes all the notes for every instrument or voice part involved in a given piece of music, written out in score order (winds, brass, keyboard/percussion/voices, and finally, strings. All instruments in a section are listed by their range in descending order: piccolo, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and so on.) Instruments are frequently listed by their German or Italian names, and often by abbreviations of these foreign names. A basic familiarity with these terms will help immensely when reading a full score. Transposing instruments are shown in their playing keys, which is why you'll see the clarinets, horns, and sax parts written in a totally different key than everyone else.

Why do we have fifteen different books for Adele 21? Why do we run to four different places in the store when you're looking for Taylor Swift? Different formats, my friend, different formats. Here's a quick guide to the most common formats you'll see when you're looking for non-classical music:

Piano/Vocal/Guitar (PVG) or Piano/Vocal/Chords (PVC)

This is the format you'll see most frequently in our "personality songbook" section. The music is written for a vocal line with a piano accompaniment, and shows guitar chord charts above the vocal line. Most often the vocal line is written into the piano part so that you don't need to sing along.

Fun fact: Back in the day (the day being the 20s-40s), sheet music and books in this format often gave ukulele chords instead of guitar chords. It's not uncommon to see accordion chords in old sheet music as well. With the insanely high level of interest in ukulele right now, I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing more music that includes uke chord charts along with or instead of guitar chords. Great book in this format: Adele 21