Mark Isaacs is a renowned jazz pianist and composer of both jazz and classical music. The nephew of legendary British jazz guitarist Ike Isaacs, Mark showed considerable talent from an early age, and in his adult life he has toured all over the world as a pianist.
In common with many composers, Mark developed his own working methods for writing music that involved paper and pencils, but he says:
While I loved my computers it just didn’t seem right to involve these machines in producing my scores. I clung to my rituals: they seemed honourable and organic. I did have the luxury of copyists producing the instrumental parts from the score. Initially they worked by hand and later with music notation software. When they started using the software it seemed like their tool, not mine. It made sense for copyists to use the programs, but for me to work with my traditional tools. Or that’s what I thought then.
Now my life has changed: I am a dedicated and passionate user of Sibelius.
Mark lists a whole bunch of reasons why he’s glad he took the leap from writing long-hand to using Sibelius, and I invite you to check them out. If you’d like to hear some of Mark’s music, check out the Mark Isaacs Resurgence Band on MySpace for some of his jazz works, or his individual MySpace page for some of his classical works.