Textual Media

     The article we read this week talked about how data and information is lost due loss various reasons. One if these is that as technology advances one format that data  can be read can not be read by later technology or software. This made me think about my work as a composer and arranger. I compose and arrange on a program called Sibelius. It is a great program to compose in because of how user friendly it is. I hate writing music by hand. It is tedious and takes forever. This is especially true if you write for an orchestra. If I write something for an orchestra in Sibelius, I can easily print out individual parts for instruments to be given to the musicians. I don’t have to rewrite the instrument parts of the score like they used to in the old days of Bach or like Beethoven.   Sibelius gives me a realistic idea of how the music will sound before I have it played live.  

      One of the down sides Sibelius and composing programs is that they keep changing and are released in newer versions. If I open a score I made in an older version of Sibelius in another version that is newer, I get a message from the program. It may have to be changed to new format something in order for it to be opened. What if someday the newer versions will not open my older scores I wrote in the older versions? This worries me some. In addition my computer with the older version of Sibelius is older. When I figure out how, I will think I will try to copy all my older scores onto a CD that I can open on my newer computer that has later version of Subelius. I don’t want to lose my work of previous compositions in the past due to the constant change and advances in technology. This is a reason why it’s a good idea to print hard copies of music in addition to having digital versions if you’re composer or arranger. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2005 at 9:18 PM and is filed under Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.