Information and communications technology in the service of the teacher: finding and arranging music for teaching music ensembles

Among the biggest challenges for the teacher while teaching music ensembles in public music schools, is finding the music that will played by the student orchestra. Searching for the compositions, selecting the appropriate arrangement, and processing and adapting the part for each student, often require more skills and time than other courses on music.

The aim of the workshop is to present best practices and propose methods to the teacher, in order to help find musical material, while saving time and cost. Modern technology nowadays provides valuable tools: open source software, ways of symbolic representation of music, interfaces between musical applications, the Internet, all of which provide solutions to the challenges in education, in a way that was unthinkable a few years ago. The music material that will be used comes mainly from European classical music and English-language commercial music; the method might also be applied to Greek music, with less impressive results however, since Greek music is less widespread on the Internet.

The workshop is related to the teaching of music in schools of primary and secondary education and in particular the course "music ensembles" at public music schools. There are no hardware requirements for the workshop, since the applications are free and available for all operating systems. However, a solid music background is obviously required in order to deal with the music score.

Regarding the methodology, literature from the discipline of Music Information Retrieval will be used. Also, criteria for the selection of appropriate software will be defined.

KEY WORDS

ICT, Open Source Software, Sheet Music, Music Ensembles