About the Composer

I discovered this service that converts any PDF into a slick browser-based document viewer, and immediately thought it might be a good way to present a score for cursory perusal. After playing around with it, I’m not so sure, but I’d love to know what others think. One of my complaints is that the icons are pretty inscrutable to those who aren’t up on the conventions.

Let me know what you think. Is it too confusing or slow to be useful, or is it a good stopgap to give folks a quick sense of what the piece is about? The service is called Issuu. Thanks to Lifehacker for alerting me to this.

Below is the score of my string orchestra piece Letter to Hungary. If you click the thumbnail, a new window will open (popup blockers beware) with a larger view.

My advice after you get the new window:

• Click the icon with two arrows pointing to the upper-right and lower-left corners. This will give you a full-screen view
• Click on a page to zoom
• Click the “hand” icon to give yourself control over dragging the page around.

So here’s StudyScores.com.

The idea is that, while Amazon.com and SheetMusicPlus may each have a pretty good selection, it’s pretty hard to find anything at either site unless you already know what you want. You have to sift through all the easy piano stuff and ColdPlay anthologies, etc.

StudyScores.com is organized around finding scores by composer, genre or time period. It’s basically Amazon’s catalog, so it’s somewhat limited, and there’s crazy stuff like putting the Mozart Requiem in the “Opera” bucket, and Sondheim’s Into the Woods under “Orchestra“, but it’s the cleanest I’ve seen so far as far as browsing scores online.

There are also sections for other books on music as well as accessories, like metronomes, etc. Pretty handy, actually. On Amazon, if I wanted, say, books on the Kodály Method, I’d have to sift through a lot of CDs and other search results. Here, you just search Kodály under “Books on Music” et voilà.

Lots of dirt-cheap Dover scores. Check it out.

MySpace has failed to capture my interest, although I was an early adopter (and gradual dropper) of similar services, such as Friendster and LinkedIn.  Friendster, which I believe originated this social networking phenomenon, seems to be purely for social interaction, which is fine, but not for everyone. (Plus, it makes me feel old.)  LinkedIn, is all-business and not particularly well suited to artistic professions, but it’s improving with time.

Classical Lounge seems promising in that it’s very specific to folks in classical music, which means less noise and more potential for a being useful networking tool.  It’s very clean and focused, and it’s easy to figure out.    Setting up a profile is completely painless. Give it a try. The network is small now, but you can help it grow.

David has a good overview of how Classical Lounge is different from MySpace, and Hugh Sung has a good description of how it works.

Here’s my profile, so you can see what it looks like.

Wow. I’m not sure I can remember how I stumbled upon this, but a few days ago I discovered one of the few truly useful things on the web. Meet Writely. This is a web-based word processor that not only stores all of your revisions, and lets you roll back to any version, but you can collaborate on documents with any number of other people.

You can…

• Import a Word document
• Export to a Word document
• Export to PDF
• Publish directly to your blog
• Make snow cones

I’m now collaborating with a playwright on a musical theater something-or-other, and so this is going to make that much easier. (I’m not quite sure how we were going to do it otherwise.)

Anyway, check it out.