[Menvi-discuss] A Piece I Wrote: The Importance of Making Concert Band Music More Readily Available in Accessible Formats

[Ella Yu]

Hi everyone,

The following is going to be lengthy, but here me out.

In light of the recent discussion on creating some kind of repository to
catalogue/store all accessible music materials that have been transcribed
worldwide, I would like to share a piece I wrote that highlights the unique
challenges of dealing with and accessing music for ensembles. The objective
of this piece is to explain to the DAISY Consortium why the concert band
world is a good target segment for their publishing outreach efforts in the
event that they wish to focus in more on a specific target audience.

Before I get to the main article, I would like to pose the following
question. To those of you who have lots of first hand experience
participating in ensembles, especially concert/wind band, do you feel that
what I have said in this piece is accurate? Also, to anyone who plays or
sings in a large ensemble, do you use websites like musescore.com to get at
least some of your performance parts in an accessible format? I would love
to hear your input.

Now to the main piece.

Introduction



Obtaining accessible sheet music, whether it be in braille, large print, or
audio, is a constant challenge for all blind and visually impaired (BVI)
musicians. This is especially true for performance parts for ensemble
music, such as for orchestra, concert band, choir, and smaller chamber
ensembles. This is because most libraries for the blind, which houses most
of the world's accessible sheet music, is concentrated on literature for
solo instruments, anthologies, and method books. Even if those libraries
offer ensemble music in braille or large print, it may only offer the full
score, or it may be a huge stack of full score + all performance parts, or
worse yet, it may be something like just the first violin part of a string
quartet and nothing else. This makes it quite challenging for BVI musicians
to locate performance parts for their ensemble music. As a result, the vast
majority of BVI musicians who play in band and orchestra or sing in a choir
has to have someone constantly by their side transcribing their performance
parts for them. Finding a transcriber to do this kind of work, even someone
who is just typing up music in notation software, is not easy, which means
that finding ways for ensemble directors or BVI musicians themselves to
produce accessible sheet music using software tools becomes especially
important.



For the last several years, the DAISY Consortium <http://daisy.org> has
been working on a project with various stakeholders from around the world
that is intended to make more sheet music available in braille, large
print, and other accessible formats. One of their key objectives is to make
high quality MusicXML files suitable for conversion into accessible formats
more readily available. In order to make this a reality, one critical step
that is being taken is consulting with publishers, composers, arrangers,
and engravers to find a way to make their materials available to a wider
audience in accessible formats, including MusicXML. You can find out more
about the DAISY music braille project here <http://daisy.org/musicbraille>.


Why target concert bands?



Blind and visually impaired (BVI) musicians participate in music making in
all its shapes and forms, but one of the most common places for music
students to be, at least in North America, is the school concert/marching
band. Over 90% of American schools have a wind band program of some kind,
which makes it one of the most common places for children and youth to
receive their first exposure to playing an instrument. The other main
musical ensembles in the typical American school is the string orchestra
and the chorus. School choral programs are quite common, but choral
participation is, to some degree, more doable without musical literacy than
instrumental ensembles. Orchestral string programs are far less common in
schools compared to wind band programs.



Another issue is the musical literature. As a violinist and violist who
regularly plays in a fairly high level community symphonic orchestra that
performs standard orchestral literature by composers such as Beethoven,
Mozart, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, etc, I am able to find a significant portion
(though not all) of my orchestra music on musescore.com, thanks to their
public domain status and popularity. Sure, because everything on
musescore.com is user-created, quality does vary, and the music I have may
not exactly match that of my section-mates in terms of markings and
rehearsal letters/numbers, but it is still a significant help.



On the other hand, the situation for concert bands is very different.
Unlike symphony orchestras who have a long, established tradition spanning
several hundred years, the concert band is a relatively new ensemble for
which the majority of its standard literature has been written in the past
50-100 years, putting most of this music well under copyright. Also,
composers continue to write relatively large quantities of music for
concert band today. This means that it is very difficult to find
performance parts for standard concert band literature in accessible
formats without resorting to getting music individually transcribed by a
braille music specialist or family/friend, unless the band director happens
to have notation/MusicXML files of the music that is being learned and
performed. Yes, musescore.com has quite a bit of sheet music for concert
band, but the bulk of that sheet music (and this applies to all of
musescore.com, really) consists of original compositions and arrangements
done mainly by amateurs, which is not necessarily the material played by
established ensembles.



Although many school, youth, and community orchestras play specially made
modern arrangements and compositions for difficulty reasons, they still
make up a significantly smaller segment than the wind band world. Although
woodwind, brass, and percussion players do play in symphony orchestras, it
is generally easier for string players to get into orchestras compared to
wind and percussion players simply due to numbers, especially at the youth
and amateur/community level, which is where the vast majority of musicians
end up post high school. This means that the vast majority of amateur
woodwind, brass, and percussion musicians end up in community concert
bands, rather than symphonic orchestras.



For all of these reasons, I feel that the DAISY Consortium should consider
the concert band world to be one important target segment in its efforts to
make music scores more available to BVI musicians. I must admit that I am
by no means an expert in the wind band world. My main instruments are
piano, violin, and viola, but I do have some first hand wind band
experience, including one year of compulsory beginning band on flute, and
one year of high school band playing flute and oboe parts on violin. I have
also spent a lot of time in online communities where there is plenty of
discussion on school bands, concert bands, and their literature. I have
also perused several support groups for parents of blind and visually
impaired children, and I found that school ensemble participation is a very
common occurrence among BVI children who study music. For reference, here
is a YouTube video
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm9675YTejs&pp=ygUkbWV0aG9kcyBmb3IgdGVhY2hpbmcgYmxpbmQgbXVzaWNpYW5z>
of a blind American teenage girl describing her experience participating in
her high school’s band program. It is a pretty good representation of what
goes on in the trenches so to speak.


Solutions and Challenges


1. Education and awareness

Most ensemble directors should be familiar with popular notation programs
such as Finale, Sibelius, and MuseScore, as they use these programs for
various reasons to produce material for their ensembles. If they understand
that anything created in notation software can be easily used to create
accessible music in some form, whether it is MusicXML files for conversion
to braille, modified stave notation for partially sighted musicians, or
MIDI audio tracks for those learning by ear, they can easily get accessible
music out to their musicians. Large print music and audio tracks can
generally be produced with just notation software alone, but the automated
conversion of printed notation to braille requires an additional piece of
specialized software. For many years, the GOODFEEL suite byDancing Dots
<https://www.dancingdots.com/main/goodfeel.htm> has been the standard for
converting print music to braille, but the rise of the newly created and
high quality Sao Mai Braille <https://saomaicenter.org/en/smsoft/smb> means
there is a far more economical (and ironically superior) solution out there.


2. The role of publishers, composers/arrangers, engravers, and distributors

Digital sheet music is on the rise. Given the relatively modern status of
concert bands in particular, I suspect the vast majority of concert band
literature is out there in a notation software file format of some kind.
It's just that ensemble directors, who usually purchase the music from
distributors or publishers, does not get access to those notation files.
This is totally understandable given copyright concerns. However, with the
DAISY Consortium working to engage more mainstream music publishers in
getting MusicXML files out into the world, this issue needs to be discussed.


One possible solution would be to integrate Sao Mai's music braille
translation library <https://saomaicenter.org/en/smsoft/sm-music-braille>
into digital sheet music systems. This is likely difficult to implement
technically, although the rise of AI could potentially help, but the end
goal will be that whenever someone buys a piece of sheet music from a
digital distributor, they will have the option of receiving an
auto-generated braille music file of either the full score or specified
performance parts. Although the output will be unproofed, I think this can
still make a huge difference, though non-standard/complex notation will be
a problem. These digital distributors should also offer a way to generate
large print scores at the point of purchase, or incorporate magnification
features into their interactive sheet music applications.



Also, Muse Group, who is the parent company of MuseScore, has acquired Hal
Leonard, one of the world's largest music publishers, especially in the
educational music space. For one, Hal Leonard has a large concert band
division. I wonder if there is a meaningful way for musescore.com and the
Hal Leonard group to make their offerings accessible in a way that can
enable ensemble directors and BVI musicians themselves to easily acquire
accessible sheet music.


3. The role of the braille music transcriber

The other issue is the role of specially trained braille music
transcribers. Most braille music transcribers spend most of their time
transcribing music on request for specific individuals, which means that
many may not be meaningfully contributing to the braille music that is
readily available to the wider public. This becomes especially problematic
for ensemble music, where most transcribers are working on individual
performance parts for a scattering of pieces for specific people that ask
and pay for it. (This is the main reason I find FMDG's online accessible
music library <https://fmdgmusicschool.org/digital-music-library> to be
less useful for a wider audience than it could be). Even if there was some
sort of catalogue of every single thing that is available in braille
worldwide, I, for one, would still find it very frustrating searching
through a whole pile of available transcriptions trying to locate the flute
1 part for a particular concert band piece, only to discover that yes, the
piece has been transcribed, but it's only the 2nd trumpet part. Another
example is when I'm looking for the first violin part for a symphony, only
to discover that yes, it exists in braille, but only a selection of
measures have been transcribed, most likely for the purpose of orchestra
seating auditions. (I will say that audition excerpts are kinda another
unique situation, but at least if you know what measure(s) the excerpt was
pulled from, assuming the whole piece is available in an accessible format,
you may be able to work from the full copy without resorting to getting it
transcribed just for you).


In the mainstream music world, much effort is put into keeping all the
parts and score of an ensemble work as close to each other as possible, and
while I know this kind of parody is harder to achieve in the braille music
world, I still find it a huge point of frustration. I just love being able
to locate full scores of ensemble music in a format that lets me extract
the performance parts I need on sites like musescore.com, since I can rest
easy knowing that, say, another BVI musician needs the same piece for their
ensemble playing but they don't play the instrument I do, the score is
available for them to extract their part from. I may be a little biased,
but I just don't love seeing a loose collection of various performance
parts for different pieces, and none of them have a full score or complete
set of parts available. Transcribed excerpts and segments of method books
and anthologies pose a similar problem, but the issues are somewhat
different, so I won't go into it here.


Also, most braille music transcribers continue to enter music by hand
six-key entry style, which, in my opinion, is a huge disadvantage to making
accessible ensemble music more available to a wider audience. If a
transcriber goes the six-key entry route to transcribe the full score,
they'll have the full score, but what if someone wants just the first flute
part or the second violin part of that orchestra score that was transcribed
entirely by hand? The transcriber then has to do a lot of extra additional
work to provide the client with the single part score they want. If, on the
other hand, the score is in notation software, it is easy to extract the
part(s) that the client wants, use automated conversion to get a braille
score, and the braille music specialist can then check it over and fix any
problems that arise. With this approach, the transcriber can still
transcribe the full score using automated tools and get a pretty usable
result to edit further.
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