One of the advantages of being half classical musician, half tech nerd is that I’ve actively enjoyed being forced to grapple with new technologies as a result of the pandemic. In order to keep doing some version of what we do, musicians have adapted to make use of video-conferencing, audio recording, and pretty much anything else we can get our hands on. I’m now the proud owner of a fancy webcam, various peripherals, and a ring light apparently designed for make-up tutorials (a potential side-hustle I will consider carefully).

Even before the pandemic, though, I had been thinking about going ‘paperless’, or something approaching it. Environmental reasons aside, I live in London now, and most of my scores are stowed in an attic. I don’t own a printer; keeping it stocked with ink (expensive) or paper (wasteful) would be a pain.

For most of my life, going paperless hasn’t been a viable option. The technology and hardware either haven’t existed or haven’t been cost-effective. Now, it seems, the tide may have turned. In this blog, I’m going to detail my experiences with going paperless, and how it’s turned out.

Tablet: iPad Pro 12.9in

I was advised by friends to go for the biggest screen possible – anything smaller than A4 doesn’t allow you to display enough of a score to work from. This led to the eventual purchase of a 12.9in iPad Pro 2020 – together with the most expensive pencil I have ever bought, the Apple Pencil 2. I decided it was worth doing it properly – and after all, as a professional tool, at least part of it will be claimable against my taxes this year.

Despite being a dyed-in-the-wool Windows advocate, I have to admit that Apple make a really good product. It’s quick, sturdy, and it looks professional, especially in the natty case I purchased for it. Apple fans tend to say ‘it just works!’ and, even though my customary response is ‘where’s the fun in that?’, it does indeed just work.

Score-reading app: ForScore

There are now a handful of apps for managing and viewing your scores, and a fair amount of variety between them. I’m indebted to the Scoring Notes blog for the thorough review of forScore which convinced me it was the one to go for.

forScore is available to download for a one-off payment of £19.99. It’s a powerful bit of software with a lot going on under the hood, though you don’t need to mess around for too long to figure out its basic functionality.

There’s still a degree of orientation required, and you have to get used to tapping the right part of the screen for what you need, for example to bring up the menu. In other words, it needs a little investment of time to ‘learn’ the software. For the first two or three rehearsals using it, I brought along hard copies just in case I couldn’t negotiate the app quickly enough, but it wasn’t long before I was happily zipping through my digital scores.

There’s no lag between page turns, which was something I had initially worried about – they respond instantaneously to a touch on the relevant side of the screen, in the same manner as Amazon’s Kindle. I’ve found I’m able to turn a page much more quickly – and with a more economical gesture – than when using a physical score, though this is a tradeoff for only being able to view one page of a score at a time.

It’s interesting the difference that this makes. As a conductor, you want to be able to absorb the salient points of a score at a glance, rather than spending all your time with your head down. Arguably, the two-page open layout of a regular physical score would be more useful in this regard. But it’s possible, with practice, to flick rapidly back and forth while conducting, due to the speed of the page-turns.

forScore has a wealth of other features including an onscreen keyboard and a metronome, which I haven’t used a great deal, but are nice to have.

Markings

Remember that expensive pencil? Well, it does more than clip to the side of the tablet looking pretty (and charging via induction). forScore’s integration with the Apple Pencil is rather clever, and I’ve quickly grown accustomed to using it for markings.

It’s easy to reach for it, and as soon as you start marking the score, the software puts you into marking mode. This works well, and you can double tap on the Pencil to turn it into an eraser, which, with a little practice, is reasonably intuitive.

My only problem here was with not always remembering to exit marking mode (by clicking the ‘Done’ button) after having replaced the Pencil. As such, when I went to turn the page, I ended up jabbing fruitlessly at a corner before realising the software was still in mark-up mode. It turns out there is a feature buried in Settings which fixes this by automatically exiting mark-up mode after a short delay.

I’ve enjoyed marking up my scores in this new environment. I’m not a big colour-coder, but the potential is there, and it’s reassuring to think that you can scribble all over it and erase it later if you go overboard.

Scores

forScore is reasonably good at importing scores from cloud-based services such as Dropbox (which I use) and Google Drive. You can then edit their title and composer information in the metadata as you please.

Here I’ll admit to a tiny bit of frustration. The integration with cloud services such as Dropbox isn’t two-way, and I’d prefer it if my markings on a score could be synchronised to the cloud-saved file. As it is, you have to manually export the score back in order to do this (unless there’s something I’m missing), which is too fiddly to do regularly. As such, I have ended up with two digital copies of a piece: one unadulterated but on the cloud, accessible anywhere on any computer; and one beautifully marked-up, but accessible only on my iPad.

The other quibble concerns the Labels you are able to add to scores, helping you organise them in the digital library. It’s nice being able to give things ‘Tags’, ‘Genres’, and ‘Labels’, but it’s not clear how each are supposed to be different. This is because each field is actually customisable and can be anything you’d like. In practice, though, I find myself getting confused trying to remember whether I’ve decided that ‘Canticle’ or ‘Sacred’ are Genres or Tags, and as such I haven’t really made use of this function.

Conclusions

First, the pros. I can travel light, with one tablet instead of multiple scores. All the music I need for multiple projects is accessible in one place, with all my markings, backed up on the cloud. The device is robust, and using it is a pleasure. I make more markings, and spend more time with my scores, because they’re always right there, just a click away.

That said, it’s not without its drawbacks. One obvious thing that I haven’t mentioned is that in order to make use of it, you need to possess a pdf or scan of the score. This is all very well with music in the public domain, which these days is available on IMSLP or CPDL – but contemporary music is a different story. Publishers have been wary of digital downloads, perhaps waiting for an app which can control permissions, like Amazon’s Kindle. It would be great, for example, to be able to have heavy books such as choral warhorse Carols for Choirs or my Bärenreiter B Minor Mass available in pdf form.

And one more important warning: remember that the iPad itself, while not exactly heavy, is still weighty enough to slide off an insufficiently robust music stand. It’s enough to give you Black Mirror-style cracked-screen nightmares.

These caveats aside, I’m very glad I took the leap. I now find it difficult to imagine my life without the iPad as my primary score-machine. It looks good, it feels good to use, and it does pretty much everything I need it to. I don’t have to worry about printing a lot of music for a one-off gig. Summoning a score I need at the touch of a button – well, it feels like the future.

Also, I can amuse myself by playing its little onscreen keyboard for hours on end. Myself, mind – I doubt anyone else is amused…