Fellow Listers: Since I first released ChordSymbol in 1996, I've been trying to encourage music instructors (initially music theory teachers, now also jazz arranging teachers) to use Finale and Sibelius integrally in their teaching. Specifically, the Rubicon is crossed when daily homework assignments are completed *digitally* by students on their own computers using the cheap student versions of these applications. This means students must learn a music-notation app along with the course content--not a small thing. But knowing such technology tools should be con sidered part of being a professional musician nowadays. And one of those tools is, or ought to be (I respectfully suggest), ChordSymbol for traditional music chord symbols and JazzSymbol for commercial music chord symbols. They're both light-years beyond the limited capacity built into the music-notation apps right now when it comes to chord symbol entry, where everyone who uses these programs has to build their own custom library of, say, jazz suffixes and tensions, or--still worse--figured bass stacks. With Unicode, such libraries can be built right into a font--ChordSymbol 2 has more than 13 times the special symbols that were in ChordSymbol 1. And to the extent our fonts become industry standard, students will have to obtain such a tool just once for use in any application, including word-processing programs such as Word. In this context I'm pleased to mention that as of last week, the next editions of both the number 1 and 2 college music theory textbooks will be formatted using ChordSymbol 2. I'm working on the commercial sheet music publishers and the jazz/pop arranging/harmony/history textbook authors and their publishers on the commercial side. In fact, we're offering to help produce such as complete sets of part-writing exercises in both Sibelius and Finale for these textbooks at low contract rates. We're even trying to set up a "share space" at our web site where instructors may exchange, at no cost, their own sets of custom-produced exercises--that representing in itself a revolutionary step forward in music teaching, and a major motivator of this posting (do please get in touch with me if you have materials you'd like to contribute). Things change fundamentally when an 18-year-old music student regularly sits down at his or her laptop, completes a homework assignment using one of these programs and a cheaply obtained copy of one of our fonts (listening to their work prior to submission), and then submits it by email. I've been out of teaching for nearly ten years. Is this sort of thing happening more regularly now? I hope so, and not just for commercial reasons. The resulting improvement in musical literacy should be dramatic, largely due to the wonderful things that these great music-notation apps make possible. Sort of a brave new world of music instruction, which I'd like our group to be part of in at least a small way. Cheers, jrc
Dr. John R. Clevenger, Manager The Virtual Conservatory 50 S. Patterson Ave., #203 Santa Barbara, CA 93111 Phone and fax: (805) 964-7988 (for fax, ignore answering machine) Email: _jclev...@aol.com_ (mailto:jclev...@aol.com) Web site: _www.virtualconservatory.com_ (http://www.virtualconservatory.com/) _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
