If you're like us, you mark up your sheet music with a pencil quite a bit. That first concerto or method book acquired many years ago shows its age and signs of being handled many times. Our parts of quintets from wedding gigs has become dog eared and ragged over the years. Despite that, it still works and we always get through the gig by dealing with the rips that have been repaired with clear tape.
The world around us continues to move in the direction of being paperless. The music world continues to be stubbornly paper reliant. An account from 100 years ago would have no idea how to function with the modern spreadsheets and other digital tools their modern day counterparts use. Aside from reading recycled paper, a brass played from 100 years ago would notice almost no difference in the sheet music on their stand. Will we be the last to make the digital transition? Do we need to abandon paper and filing cabinets stuffed with dead trees?
Around the turn of the century, we began to see publishers begin offering sheet music for download on the web. Fear about piracy was rampant. This was in the era of Napster and the terror the recording industry felt was on the minds of other industries. This caused a number of providers to either avoid paperless delivery altogether or adopt a Digital Rights Management (DRM) system that made the digital copy so difficult to work with many consumers tried once and never again. Over time, many providers have switched to file formats and delivery systems that are more customer friendly such as the ubiquitous PDF.
In the intervening years since digital delivery has taken hold it still culminates in the same end point. However you get the file or whatever format, it still means a visit to a printer. The delivery mechanism has changed for many, but it's still ink and paper that gets used at the performance. Will that change? The New York Times did a story recently on some taking the charge.
“Ms. Wu takes pride in being an “early adopter” of the iPad and can rattle off its benefits to the traveling musician. By her own count, she is performing 42 works this summer. In the past, the attendant sheet music would have filled three quarters of a suitcase. Now she carries an entire library in a sleek tablet. Page turns have become quiet and elegant thanks to a wireless pedal. (Where her enemies were once awkward page turners, they’re now Chinese concert halls with Bluetooth blockers.) She needn’t worry about losing her scores or seeing the paper deteriorate over the course of a long tour. And in master classes, she scribbles notes for her students onto her tablet, saving a separate file for each player.”
If you believe this is where we're headed, the question then becomes what sort of device will we read our parts from? Even a big phone won't work for this. A kindle is great for books, but could be awkward for fitting a Strauss part on the display. Gvidio, a Tokyo based company, has an intriguing solution. The system is a 13 inch display and uses e-ink technology to give similar readability to a kindle. The display has two sides (think like a book that opens and has opposite pages) to give two pages at a time to view. There's also an ability to make notes on the page.
Will this solution or another one ever pull us away from our file cabinets? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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