Musescore is a wonderful tool. It has made a huge impact on my musical development over the past couple decades. Sheet music is the primary way I communicate and record musical ideas, and Musescore the tool and musecore.com have combined to make a process that works for me and my musical needs.

I have also spent a few years writing software, and the methods that we have learned to use in software development have evolved due to needs of scale and flexibility. I would like to apply some of those lessons to how I manage sheet music. But there are disconnects.

The biggest issue I have is that I want the same core song in multiple different but related formats. The second biggest issue is that I want to be able to make changes to a song, and to collaborate with other composers in making those changes.

The Sheet music I work with is based on the western notation system. I use a fairly small subset of the overall notation system, as what I am almost always working towards is a musical arrangement for small groups. The primary use case I have is for lead sheets: a melody line and a series of chords for a single instrument. Often, this is for a horn player. I need to be able to transpose the melody line into the appropriate key and range for that particular horn: E flat for a Baritone sax, C for a Flute, B flat for a saxophone, C but in Bass clef for a Trombone.

The second use case I have is to be able to arrange a section harmonically for a set of instruments. This means reusing the melody from a lead sheet, but then selecting notes for the other instruments to play as accompaniment. Often, this can be done on piano first, and then allocation the notes the piano plays out to the single-note horns.

I also wish to make play-along recordings, using ireal pro. This uses a very small subset of the lead sheet information: really just the chords and the repeats. A more complex version could be used to build MMA versions.

When I work with a more complex arrangement, I often find that I change my mind on some aspect: I wish to alter a repeat, a chord symbol, or the set of notes in the melody line.ideally that would be reflected through all the various aspects of the score.

The musescore files are stored in an xml format developed for the program. This XML file is compressed, and the the file extension reflects this: mscz. I have a song that is 40 measures long (32 with 8 bars repeated) and no more than 2 chords per measure, no more than 8 notes per measure. The underlying document used to store this song, when transposed for 6 different instruments is 22037 lines long. This is not a document format meant to be consumed by humans.

Here is a sample of how a single note is represented:

        <Articulation name="marcatoStaccato">
          <velocity>120</velocity>
          <gateTime>50</gateTime>
          </Articulation>

Here is an example for a chord

 <Chord>
            <linkedMain/>
            <durationType>quarter</durationType>
            <Note>
              <linkedMain/>
              <pitch>74</pitch>
              <tpc>16</tpc>
              </Note>
            </Chord>

This is generated code. When software is responsible for creating more software, it will often product the output in a format that can then be consumed by another tool designed to read human readable source and convert it to binary. XML is a notoriously chatty format, and the number of lines in the Musescore file reflects that.

The “document” that we humans interface with is based on pen and paper. If I were to do this by hand, I would start with a blank page of pre-printed staff paper, and annotate on it such details as the clef, the key signature, the bar lines, the notes, and the chord symbols. This system is optimized for hand-written production, and human reading-on-the-stage consumption. This is how it is displayed on the screen as well. Why, then is the underlying file format so unfriendly?

Because file formats are based on text, and we have restricted that to very specific rules as well: Characters are represented as numeric values (ascii now unicode) and anything implying the layout on the page needs to be embedded in the document as well.

There are options for turn text into sheet music: ABC and Lilypond are both formats that do this. Why don’t I use those? I have tried in the past. But when I am writing music, I am thinking in terms of notation, not in terms of text, and they end up preventing me from doing what I need. They don’t solve the transposition or other problems as is. Perhaps the issue is that we need more tooling around one of these format, but then we return to the problem of generated code.

Once the sheet music is printed out, the options for annotating a revision is to write on the sheet music, or to edit the original source and reprinting it. In practice, both of these are done often. IN front of me on my desk is a copy of a tune where both chords and individual notes have been changed in pencil. After living with these revisions for quite some time, I eventually got them recorded back into the source file and reprinted it.

Carrying around reams of sheet music quickly becomes unfeasible. If you are in multiple groups, each of which have a large repertoire, the need to reduce the physical burden will likely lead you to an electronic solution: sheet music displayed on a tablet. However, the way that you distribute sheet music here will determine what options you have allowed for the artist to annotate corrections and instructions on the music in front of them: most PDFs don’t let you edit them, and you cannot write on a screen with a ball point pen.

As a band director, I would like to be able to note changes on a score for a particular group and automate the distribution of that change to the group.

As a band member I would like to be able to make changes to a score and have them show up when I view the score electronically. Ideally, these changes would be reflected in the ireal/MMA version that I use to practice as well as the sheet music I read.

As a collaborator, I would like to be able to submit a suggested change to a score as played by my group and have the music director be able to incorporate my suggestion into the score.

As a collaborator, I would like to be able to receive suggestions from another collaborator, and provide feedback on the suggestion if I decide not to include it as-is.

As an arranger, I would like to be able to come up with a score on piano and automate the process of converting it to a set of instruments.

As a band leader, I would like to be able to come up with a lead sheet in Musescore and automate the process of converting it to MMA and irealpro formats. I would like to be able to import the accompaniment from an irealpro or MMA format into a musescore document as a first pass for the percussion or other rhythm section arrangement.

I had long thought about an application to make it possible to work on music together with other people. At West Point we used to say Collaborate and Graduate. For this, I say:

Collaborate and Orchestrate.