profile

Outside Shore Music / Mastering MuseScore

Special Café episode - MuseScore in education

Published over 1 year ago • 3 min read

Hello! It's the beginning of a new school year, although it's feels a little strange to me, as this is the first the first autumn in almost twenty years where I haven't been spending my time standing in front a classroom full of college students. But, I love what I'm doing now! The Music Engraving and Musicianship Skills workshops are covering tons of ground - the sorts of things that often fall through the cracks in a unviersity, where there is normally a set syllabus that defines what gets covered. As always, you're welcome to join us any time!

MuseScore Café

This week in the MuseScore Café with Marc Sabatella, I focus on the use of MuseScore in educational settings. I try to do this once at the beginning of each school year, to help teachers and students get off to a great start!

The free MuseScore Café is live on Wednesday at 12:30 PM Eastern (16:30 GMT, or 17:30 during the winter months), and you can access past episodes in the archive.

Tip of the Week

This week's tip is one that should be of special interest to teachers and students - how to create highlighted text annotations:

It's pretty easy to do, especially once you've set it all up the first time - but it's hard to figure out if you don't know the tricks. Luckily, you have me to show you how:

  1. Add staff text via Ctrl+T
  2. In the Inspector, set the Frame to Rectangle
  3. Optionally set the text color (I left it black in the above)
  4. Optionally set the border color (the example above is red)
  5. Optionally set the "thickness", "margin", and "corner radius" (the example above has 0.15 sp, 0.50 sp, and 36 respectively)
  6. Now the important part: click the apparently empty area next to the "hightlight", and set the color (the example above is yellow).
  7. Even more important: in that same dialog, also set the "alpha channel", otherwise it will be completely transparent and hence invisible. A value of 255 is opaque. Values between 0 and 255 will be translucent like an actual highlighter pen.

Once you have one of these set up the way you like, just Ctrl+Shift+drag (Cmd+Shift+drag on Mac) it to your palette for easy reuse. From now on you can add this text with a single click.

Music Master Class

This week in the Music Master Class with Marc Sabatella, I continue to feature your music and also projects from the Musicianship Skills Workshop.

The free Music Master Class is live on Thursday at 12:30 PM Eastern (16:30 GMT, or 17:30 during the winter months), and you can access past episodes in the archive.

In Theory

In this week's project for the Music Engraving Workshop, we're working on a Beethoven piano sonata - no. 8, opus 13, a.k.a. Pathétique. This piece has always been special to me since learning it in high school, and I've revisted it often over the years. I especially love the drama of the first movement and the lyric beauty of the second. Each has the power to move us, and the power to teach us!

One of the most striking things to me about the first movement is the form - the way it starts with a slow introduction that that works its way back as an interlude later, and the way the piece modulates to distant keys (C minor to Eb minor to Eb major to G minor to E minor, and on from there). The modulation from G minor to E minor in particular was, I think, my first real exposure to the idea of exploiting the symmetry of diminished chords to vist new harmonic territory. It may be a classic textbook technique today, but Beethoven practically wrote that textbook.

In the second bar of the interlude, Beethoven is in G minor, and he writes a passage with F#o7/C resolving to Gm/Bb (viio43 - i6 in G minor). He then repeats that same passage in the next bar, but this time, half way through the phrase he respells the F#o7 as its enharmonic twin, D#o7, which he then resolves to Em/B (viio2 - i64 in E minor):

Here's that passage from the recording I grew up listening to, by Rudolph Serkin:

So many things go into a piece like this, and it's definitely more than sum of its parts. But the parts are worthy of appreciation in themselves!

Outside Shore Music / Mastering MuseScore

by Marc Sabatella

My name is Marc Sabatella, and I am the founder of Outside Shore Music - a pioneer of online music education since the dawn of the web. As the creator of Mastering MuseScore, A Jazz Improvisation Primer, and other resources, I have dedicated most of my life to helping as many musicians as I can. Subscribe to my free newsletter for MuseScore tips, theory insights, and more information on how to create your best music!

Read more from Outside Shore Music / Mastering MuseScore

Hello! This week in the Practical Counterpoint course, we are wrapping up our focus on two-part counterpoint. We have a fun project to cap it off with, so even if you're not taking the course, you'll probably enjoy this week's Music Master Class! Mastering MuseScore If you are interested in getting the most out of the world's most popular music notation software, join our community with a Mastering MuseScore membership for the most comprehensive training & expert support available! MuseScore...

3 days ago • 1 min read

Hello! This week marks the first day of spring, and after the snowstorm we just experienced here in Colorado a few days ago, I'm ready! In the Practical Counterpoint course, we are continuing our exploration of so-called "species counterpoint". This is a subject that is often taught with little or no reference to any actual context, making it seem like an abstract concept with no relevance to real music. My aim is always to focus on the practical value of the theory, and species counterpoint...

10 days ago • 2 min read

Hello! An important note to members outside the US: we started daylight savings time this week. That means if you didn't also set your clocks ahead in your part of the world, my live events will now be an hour earlier. So be sure to do the math to see what 12:30 Eastern now works out to be for you! For the rest of spring / summer / fall, events will be at 4:30 PM (16:30) UTC.Meanwhile, a new batch of lessons is now available in the Practical Counterpoint course, so be sure to check them out,...

17 days ago • 2 min read
Share this post