James Kearney wrote: >Yesterday I learned a lot from the first episode of British composer Howard >Goodall's new 5-part series "Big Bangs." For instance, I didn't realise >the significance of Guido Monaco of Arezzo, who invented the principles of >music notation in the eleventh century. Goodall also commented on the way >computer tools like Sibelius will have as profound an influence on music >composition and publication as the invention of printing. I also saw this and although I found Goodall's presentation annoying at times I do think he got his material across rather well. I shall certainly make a point of watching the next four episodes. Goodall had another series a little while ago provocatively entitled "Goodall's Organ Works", which probably tells you all you need to know about his jovial style. I do take issue with his point about Sibelius etc. (the music software, not the composer!) He quickly demonstrated how notes could be entered onto a score from the computer keyboard, and then moved on to show how he could also input music directly from playing an electronic keyboard (instrument) onto the screen and then to a printed score. He showed that the software picked up every detail of his performance and therefore notated rhythmic inaccuracies etc. to produce a much more complex printed part than he would have written by hand in the old-fashioned way. He then argued that this more-than-necessarily-difficult score would not be usable by most practical musicians, and that the result of widespread take-up of Sibelius et al would be to produce an elite of "literate" musicians who could cope with such things, while the rest got along without the benefits of written music. Now I don't know the recent versions of Sibelius, but I imagine they contain some sort of quantize function that ignores small deviations of rhythm etc. and rounds things off to the nearest eighth-note, or whatever - i.e. doing automatically exactly the kind of editing process that Goodall demonstrated note-by-note to turn his high-precision score into a more performer-friendly version. I haven't yet had the opportunity to read Goodall's argument in full in the book of the series, but it seems to me that he produced a gross distortion of the value and impact of Sibelius etc. in order to produce a neat finish to Episode One by Comparing his idea of a new electronic elite to the small numbers of monks who preserved the plainchant tradition during the Dark Ages. Ian Crisp [log in to unmask]