[Smt-talk] Music Students Would Benefit From Music Technology Education At Music School

[CARSON FARLEY]

All music students and musicians will need to use music technology and software at some important moment in their career. Whether it is for recording promotional material for agents/auditions, or distribution of creative/commercial work, or arranging and scoring parts for jobs, or composing music for film, video, multimedia, or for writing technical books or educational materials that require musical symbols and graphics, etc. Music departments should embrace music technology and see it as the necessity it is for today's contemporary musician and not view it as a crutch for those who are incapable of doing something else. All commercial composers (and those are the majority of professionals working in the industry - not the rare genius art composer) use music technology and software as an essential interface to their daily profession. If you don't believe that watch an episode of PBS's Nova or Frontline, a documentary program, or any media for that matter. Expecting the contemporary musician to deal with music technology/software apart from music school is like expecting an architect or engineering student to learn and use CAD once they have finished school. Everyone in the modern world has come to rely on technology and use it for everyday real world applications and musicians are no different. All of my professional work as a composer scoring for video has required the use of music technology - not to write the music, but as the required format that is used in the industry. I did not learn that at music school. I purposely took it upon myself to learn because I knew it would be essential and this has turned out to be true. 


Carson Farley 
Composer/cellist/theorist
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.societymusictheory.org/pipermail/smt-talk-societymusictheory.org/attachments/20140509/8f6d7f8f/attachment.htm>