Week 3 Readings - Music Notation Software

For me, music notation software has a myriad of personal and educational benefits. On the most obvious level, as educators we can use it to write music for our groups. Now, while you're probably thinking "that's the most obvious statement ever", many 'old school' band directors shy away from it and underestimate how beneficial this software can be to meeting not only student's needs, but our own.

For example, how many times have you been missing a horn part and then proceeded to throw the poor player on some alto sax part that is already being doubled by an army of 10 or more loud saxes? With music notation software, you can easily write out a new, more musically effective part, replacing the old. Got a copy of an 80-year-old-yellow-wrinkled-can-hardly-even-readable piece of music? Enter it in to Sibelius/Finale to make a cleaner, legible copy that stops the one efervestant student from raising his hand every five minutes to waste valuable rehearsal time by asking if it's an F# or F natural in measure 5. Also, with advanced playback and sequencing options, whether your band falls victim to awkward instrumentation, is a middle-school aged group in need of easier parts, or you are blessed with one amazing player that you would like to feature as a soloist, you can write new parts to feature your star sections and players or do some musical-chair-esque rearranging of parts to highlight what actually sounds good by previewing it first. Or, if you are the over-achieving type, can create custom compositions for your group or small ensembles easily and listen to it with advanced playback. MIDI files of your composition can also be easily exported and given to students to take home and listen to. However, the compositions do not necessarily have to be concert material. Usuing Finale's 'exercise wizard", you can create custom exercises for students that feature a wide variety of teaching drill from scales to arpeggios. The possibilities are proportionate to the number of kids that will continuously forget to bring a pencil to rehearsal - yep you guessed it, endless.

However, the benefits of music notation software go far beyond the educator. For a college musician like myself, notation software has proved to be very helpful on a myriad of various music theory assignments as a way of making an assignment much more professional-looking than just using pencil and staff paper. Also, as someone who was originally very apprehensive about composition, I found using Sibelius to be a smooth transition as it is not only provides a quick and easy setup and foundation, but checks for parallel octaves/fifths, shows when certain instruments are out of their playable range, and offers immediate playback capabilities (I'm definitely an auditory learner when it comes to music). It has especially been helpful with arrangements I have done for my saxophone quartet (some that I could whip up in 24 hours) and other small groups as well. With this being said, having your students experiment with composition using music notation software, especially in schools that do not have a plethora of music classes, is a great way to encourage your students musically outside of the classroom. Perhaps you could hold contests for the best compositions or a student recital of all original works(akin to the MIDI project)? The more unique the approach, the more the students are likely to be motivated and the better they will perform for you.

Keeping it easy, fun, engaging students, and making your life significantly easier - what's not to like about music notation software?