Yehudi Menuhin’s marked-up copy of Bach’s Solo Violin Sonata No. 2 - Royal Academy of Music Foyle Menuhin Archive The advent of…

Yehudi Menuhin’s marked-up copy of Bach’s Solo Violin Sonata No. 2 - Royal Academy of Music Foyle Menuhin Archive

The advent of the mass-produced graphite pencil in the second half of the 19th century coincided with profound changes in the way a performer engaged with a musical text. The generation of musicians who benefited from the new tool — capable of making durable, but erasable, markings that didn’t harm paper — were, he wrote, “the first where practice was aimed at perfection of execution, and not developing the skills for real-time extemporization on the material in front of them, or improvisation ‘off book.’

What changes does the new digital technology reflect or enable? Conversations with some of classical music’s most passionate advocates of the gadgets and with developers like forScore and Tonara that write applications for them reveal a number of developments. The traditional top-down structure of teaching has been shaken loose. The line between scholarly and practical spheres of influence is becoming blurred. And the very notion of a definitive text is quickly losing traction — and with it, the ideal of that “perfection of execution.”

(via https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/arts/music/when-classical-musicians-go-digital.html )