For obvious reasons, a lot of performers (especially solo performers) are now using screens (mostly tablets) rather than paper sheet music. Standard style guides (notably Gould) don’t seem to take this into account at all. Can anyone suggest any good resources for preparing screen/tablet friendly scores?
I ask because while a lot of the traditional wisdom about page turn placement carries over, there are different constraints (e.g. a tablet can’t unfold to display 3-4 pages of music simultaneously) and finnicky details around things like repeats (turning forward or back 1 page may be easy, turning back multiple pages, not so much).
I don’t have much experience of performing from a tablet myself, so I don’t feel I have a good handle on what tricks and tools performers may exploit, and what possibilities exist from the cheap-and-cheerful to the sophisticated-and-preprogrammed. For example, I have an iPad with forScore and a few other apps, but I’ve never owned or used any of the different pedal systems out there. I also don’t feel I understand sufficiently well the different experiences between, say, a player of a handheld instrument (who will typically have either a hand or foot free to do an electronic page turn) vs. a pianist or other keyboard player (who may have both hands and feet busy with other things).
Would be very grateful to hear everyone’s thoughts, advice, and experience, especially if anyone can point me to well crafted guidance and other resources for composers and engravers.
I’ve played exclusively from iPad for the past 13 years, as have my fellow musicians. 99% of the time these days, it’s the big iPad. A couple thoughts.
The page turn is still king. But it’s faster to turn a page on an iPad, so that’s something. If you have three systems on a page because of a page turn, that’s what you do. Performers don’t care about excess white space.
No repeat structures. I mean, why would you? It’s digital. And you can copy/paste.
Larger page numbers than for print edition. Why, don’t know.
If you’re in the US, standard letter size works fine on a large iPad.
I’ve been using the iPad since the first Retina display device came out (15? years ago). I recently was given an iPad pro to replace the old iPad. (So much better). I play piano and organ. I use forScore, which reads PDF files. Other apps are similar to it.
You can display 2 pages at once which, on the iPad pro is quite readable. In forScore you can program what looks like a button to press to go back to a specific page or jump to a coda. However, if you are creating your own PDF files, write out the repeats.
The page turning pedals are nice, but as an organist, useless. I do use pedals for page turning if I’m doing a concert (as a soloist or accompanist). In a few rare cases both feet are being used even on piano but reaching up with your finger is quicker than turning paper music.
When it comes to the engraving side of things, since each tablet has different dimensions, the thought to setup the page size using pixels to match the screen size of your tablet may not work for someone else’s tablet. If that’s not a concern, then find the size of your pad and set the page size. I usually setup to 8.5 x 11" page size and use forScore’s zoom in function to remove the white space. I’ve not tried setting it to 9x13 (which I think might be closer to the pro tablet’s screen size) and eliminating margins. I’d be interested in hearing what others do on the engraving side of things.
How in practice do you deal with historical music that has those repeat structures? (I expect there’s a few different ways, I could guess at some, but don’t want to assume, although your remarks about copy/paste would seem to suggest how performers could edit/extend their parts for performance.)
Related: how readily can one turn pages back if needed? (I would guess not only if a historical piece needs it, but also if e.g. one accidentally turns forward 2 pages. I don’t know how much that happens as a practical problem.)
What I’m taking away from this is that, from a Dorico point of view, it’s probably a good idea to create separate layouts for paper- and screen-targeting versions of a score or part. Composers and engravers, is that common practice?
Good to know, but I was asking more about what you would do as a performer who receives a part (presumably PDF most of the time) for a historical piece that has those repeat structures. (Or perhaps, when you’re scanning a paper part into forScore or the like.) Would it be a copy-paste-pages edit job?
Specifically w.r.t. Dorico I feel that creating two flows ought to be unnecessary, at least in theory – I would be looking instead for a layout option to explode repeats, so that one has a single point of origin for the musical material (through which edits can propagate) and can then create different layouts (rather than flows) that display it in different but coherent ways. But that’s a composer/engraver problem rather than about what a performer sees.
I had some experiences when I didn’t quite touch the right part of the screen, that made me wonder if it was always so easy … ! But that sounds like it might be a me problem.
I know, and swiping back on the screen is not so hard either, but … that works for a single page transition. I was (and am) curious if some of the more sophisticated pedal setups were being used to handle things like multi-page turns back and forwards (da Capo, dal Segno, al Coda, long repeated passages…) but it sounds like not. And that makes sense to me because it seems so fragile by comparison to just creating a version of the part that keeps going forward.
Been on stage, singing professionally from iPad, since iPad2 came out. ForScore. 12.9’’ Pro now.
Have also created numerous scores for my groups.
Repeat structures of existing notes- in case of existing vocal scores it is easy: ForScore has jump buttons. For instrumentalists with foot pedals this is not handy though.
Page format: keep it to 4:3, that is iPad screen side ratio.
For singers: it there is music with 4 different texts under same notes- use one verse at a time. More pages isn’t a problem. One text at a time is much easier to sight-read.
I think there is a clear difference between a ‘practical’ edition and a ‘fine’ edition. The first does not require much; basically, anything readable works. The second requires “skill” and experience to make. It might be practical; it might not. It depends on what you want to achieve. If we take, e.g. @dan_kreider’s last masterpiece, the Anfangs are nice, but they are not “practical”; they disturb the reader. The same could be said for small caps. It’s all “fluff” and beautiful as such.
I make music for print, not digital, but I publish the “printed pages” as PDF. I would never reformat anything to be “practical” for a pad. There was a life before pads, and people managed well.
I guess the most practical for a pad would be a “marquee line” of music that flows past at the required tempo, without any page turns. Again, I would never spend time producing that kind of output. I think it should look pretty, too, in libraries, when all pads are dead and gone. There is enough ugly music on the MuseScore hub, we don’t need to add more using a pro tool like Dorico.
For an a vista performance, page turns play a major part, but most concert performers either know the music by heart or create a beautiful collage of pages on the stand. I do remember those lovely recording sessions with Carlo Curely!
I write mainly for tablets these days as that’s what almost all of my colleagues are using. You can set up jumps for codas and segnos (at least with For score and mobile sheets pro which I use) if they go back/forward multiple pages, which is good if you’ve got pdfs of legacy parts that were formatted to printed sizes. However I always have layouts formatted for tablets these days with virtually no margins and the aspect ratio set to the aspect ratio of my personal tablet. (It works pretty well with iPada too) I set the margins to virtually nothing too as you don’t need them on a tablet and it enables you to get more music on a page. I find (in the UK using A4 paper sizes), that when the reading software zooms the pages to fit, the pages will pretty much all have a large white space at the bottom.
What a statement! I had to see the background of the writer to understand why he posted this. Understood
About skill statement. I have been in the position (luckily more than once) that my full scale opera has been performed in the opera house, currently even 2 are running presently in our local National Opera repertoire. To state that a practical edition does not require skill, is simply put- arrogant. I am not talking about iPad vs. paper. Opera houses usually use paper, smaller scale groups are on iPads often. We have a production that has about 300 people involved in total. Every mistake, unreadable, not understandable place in score- when you are at a orchestral rehearsal you can multiply wasted time for a Q-A session by the number of people present. So there is a big responsibility and quite an amount of skill and experience involved.
Maybe the “fine” edition can be defined by having a house style for a set of your scores. I really do not care about that but it is very far from “anything goes”.
Thank you for attention to this matter!
I think we are talking about “skill” on various levels. There is skill in arranging/composing/preparting parts, and there is skill (and a somewhat pathological devotion) on looking in detail at an element and place it at the ‘correct’ place, etc. Cf. the recent discussion about circled numbers. Very few practical performers would care about 1/10 of a mm to far down. There are loads of music that is well arranged/composed that look awful (MuseScore…) that sell well, then we have the ‘@dan_kreider level’ of graphical output. I’m sure he would never think of making his fine books for an e-reader with variable font size for the visually impaired, however practical that would be in the end. We ‘need’ some kind of fine output, for the sake of the notation art, and to show that Dorico output is above anything else, in the hands of a skilled engraver.
The big benefit of paper over iPad is that paper on a music stand will generally permit 2 to 3 pages at a glance. Indeed, in Broadway practice it is common to see the instruction to OPEN 3 PAGES in cases where the performer has no rests or even sustained notes to permit a page turn.
Regarding repeats - yes, tablets can manage them, but there is really no reason to do so. Repeats were invented to save paper - good idea - but no longer needed. I recall a masterclass for singers, and they were told that the music they give to the accompanist should have no repeats, or at least no backward page turns; there isn’t always someone to turn pages, so you really only want to go in one direction. Tablets are one of the revolutionary developments that will change how music is written - on the page.
On a related note, I am seeing more and more chamber ensembles playing from scores, rather than parts. A few nights ago I saw very famous string quartet, and from where I was sitting I could see the cellist’s tablet: for at least two of the pieces they played from the score. One of the works was a new/modern work that is not part of the standard rep; the other was a work that is part of every quartets offerings. I’m not passing judgement on the use of the score vs. the part - whatever gets the job done. And yes, the concert was fabulous!
If ‘expanding repeats’ is the new fashion, can we then please, in a future Dorico version, have the “dynamic copy” with conditional texts etc. as used in Amadeus?
And paper’s battery never dies. Nor does it ever require a reboot. My son has grown up with the current technology, but prefers paper for these and other reasons.
In some cases (I include myself in this observation) the composer will find themselves composing according to the necessity of turning the pages on the iPad rather than the musical content itself. Sort of like “oh, I need a drum break here so my bass player can turn the page”. Somewhat gratuitous. But that does happen with paper also…
But paper does blow away, have liquid spilt on it, be too hard to read in dark venues and have it sucked three stories down an air conditioner return air duct (true story). There are advantages and disadvantages to both. I see no need to discuss that paper or tablets are better then the other because they aren’t.
