Teaching with Technology

This article focuses on the shift of traditional paper musical scores to digital musical scores. I asked myself a question as I read this article: are music educators (including myself) and publishers of printed music really ready to go digital?

The music recording and publishing companies have transformed their way of delivering content last few years. I don’t even remember when I last bought a CD of audio music. I still have not started to look around “digital musical score,” yet I have downloaded and used sheet music on Internet a few times. With the emergence of online music stores such as iTunes and Amazon MP3 where music can be purchased and downloaded, the old business model of selling physical records or compact discs seem to become antiquated. One would think that with this relatively sudden transition to digital audio files, musical scores, sheet music and even method books would follow with a similar transition into this digital age. The author claims that music teachers and publishers are more hesitant to embrace this transition to digital music notation even though there sites that offer legal downloads of sheet music, and many people are already taking advantage of these sites.
The author states that one should consider sites where legal download is available before making the switch from paper source to digital scores. He suggests the following websites:

For classical music: www.imslp.org (free)
For popular music: www.musicnotes.com (user fee applied)
www.sheetmusicscores.com (user fee applied)

The author adds that the demand for digital downloads of musical scores will increase to the extent that publishers provide their resources for purchase and download. The author envisions that most of musicians (or at least our successors) will move away from paper (I won’t be one of them). He claims that musicians and even orchestras are trying out digital music readers (the Amazon Kindle version of musical score).

Musicians interact with music notation in a more intimate fashion than the way the average person simply consumes musical audio. I personally like to mark up my scores with fingering and reminders. So even though it would be terrific to have a nice thin device that could display musical notation and be placed conveniently on a music stand or music rack on the piano, we still would need the capability to edit our own score or even “write” on it. Even with a tablet PC or software that allows a user to mark up and annotate score through the touch screen, I think this advanced technology can benefit classes such as music history, music theory and group instrumental pedagogy instruction where professors and students can take an advantage of exploring the tool in so many different ways to interact with one another.

Mario Ajero. Switching to Digital Musical Score in the Digital Age: American Music Teachers. April/May 2009. pp. 58-59.