Composer and educator David MacDonald describes in detail how he teaches composition using the iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, and a suite of apps, and why he can’t imaging returning to the dead-tree way of doing things.
composition
Sibelius is a cog in The Listening Machine
The Listening Machine is an ambitious project to generate automatically a continuous stream of music based on the activities of 500 Twitter users in the UK, from May to September 2012. The work was commissioned by The Arts Council in the UK for The Space, a pioneering public service joint venture between the BBC and The […]
Alexis Cuadrado’s “A Lorca Soundscape” scored in Sibelius, premieres in New York this month
A Lorca Soundscape is a new work by bassist-composer Alexis Cuadrado, reflecting on Federico Garcia Lorca‘s 1930 book Poeta en Nueva York with a series of jazz pieces that use the poetry by as lyrics. To be premiered at the Center for Latino Arts and Culture at Rutgers University in New York on 27 March, […]
Michael Zev Gordon’s Allele scored in Sibelius
Coming up in July are three opportunities to hear a remarkable new choral work in which singers sing parts derived directly from their own genetic code. The new piece, Allele, by Michael Zev Gordon, with text by poet Ruth Padel, will be performed by the New London Chamber Choir (NLCC), under the direction of James […]
Sixth grade Sibelius students partner with Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra
It’s always a thrill to hear about Sibelius being used by young musicians starting out in composition, so it was a delight to receive an email from Walt Boyer, specialist music teacher at Atwater Elementary School in Shorewood, Wisconsin, about his school’s involvement in Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra‘s Arts in Community Education programme, which this year […]
The making of Pat Metheny’s “Orchestrion”
Just before Christmas, I posted about the sleeve art for guitarist, composer and Sibelius user Pat Metheny’s new album, Orchestrion, which features a Sibelius 6 box lurking amidst the huge variety of musical instruments that cram the picture. (If you look really closely you can see Pat himself at the left-hand side, hiding behind his […]
Learning more advanced cut-away score techniques
This tutorial was contributed by composer, teacher and choral director Peter McAleer. If you would like to contribute a tutorial for the benefit of Sibelius users around the world, please get in touch. This tutorial builds on some of the techniques first introduced in Creating cut-away or scrapbook scores and addresses some problems with scores containing […]
Sibelius and Virtual Drumline masterclass in Katy, TX
If you happen to be located in the Houston area, you may be interested to know that expert Sibelius and Tapspace Virtual Drumline user Bryan Harmsen of Visaudio Designs will be holding a masterclass in the Seven Lakes High School Band Room in Katy, TX on Wednesday 7 October at 7pm. The class costs just […]
Fun with nested tuplets
Sibelius user Kyle Gann is, in his own words, a “composer, musicologist, writer, educator”, which means that he must always be very busy! On his ArtsJournal blog, PostClassic, he writes engagingly about a variety of contemporary music topics — and, every once in a while, about Sibelius. In his post The Things You Can Steal […]
Transformations plug-ins in Sibelius 6 help develop ideas
Sibelius 6 is so chock-full of new features that it’s easy for some to be overlooked (hence my little things series), but thanks to my pal, the lovely and talented James Humberstone, some more hidden gems are coming to light. Together with James and plug-in developer extraordinaire Bob Zawalich, we added a suite of plug-ins to […]