Yesterday (Sep 15th), I was invited by a professor from a university who has been helping me for a long time to give a presentation about our online courses at the 19th National Conference: Electronic Piano and ICT Division of The Japan Society for Electronic Keyboard Music (JSEKM).
This was the first time I had attended the JSEKM conference in person since 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, but I made new acquaintances with many researchers and had a very meaningful day.
This was the first time I had attended the JSEKM conference in person since 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, but I made new acquaintances with many researchers and had a very meaningful day.
In 2019, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology launched the GIGA School Initiative, which has promoted the provision of network environments and one computer for each student in elementary and junior high schools nationwide. However, since then, due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, technologies such as online communication and AI have advanced rapidly.
It seems that one of the current challenges in the music education world is to organize and reconstruct the various new initiatives that have been attempted in this environment for the next step.
Part of the content of my presentation, which was given in response to this trend, can be seen in the blog post of the same name published on Aug 6th.
(The title of the blog post has been changed due to the subsequent sunset incident.)
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By the way, I had the opportunity to exchange various opinions with other participants (mainly school teachers) on the day, and since music notation has traditionally played a major role in music education, I strongly felt that the issue of Finale's sunset has had a negative impact on the academic world as well.
Since the main music notation software used in current school education is Flat or MuseScore, the direct impact of the discontinuation of Finale's development and sales does not seem to be as great as that of the publishing and music production industries.
As long as you do not change the OS environment in which you use Finale, you can continue to use the huge number of Finale files you have created so far as before.
The impact on academic circles is not only due to the discontinuation of the product, but also due to the end of the culture of music notation technology that had been built up over more than 30 years since Finale's birth in 1988.
For example, the website of the Japan Society for Music Education's COVID-19 Countermeasures “Music Education Support Project Team” introduced an article titled “Finale Family Products: Online Collaboration and Use in Music Education” that was published in Club Finale, an owned media of a domestic sales agent.
Also, some of the presentations at the conference that day also used the article series “Thinking about the Benefits of Introducing Music Notation Software” as reference material.
All of these articles that were published in Club Finale became unavailable when the agency contract ended, and unfortunately they are no longer available to read.
Although it is a small follow-up, some of the articles published in Club Finale were translated into Japanese from blogs published by MakeMusic, the developer of Finale, or reorganized for Japanese users.
For example, I believe the aforementioned “Thinking about the Benefits of Introducing Music Notation Software” series consisted of the following three articles.
Article about Mr. Motohiko Hamase: While composing and performing, he is engaged in research on Charlie Parker, and writes a research book based on databases he creates by transcribing music using music notation software.
Article about Mr. Shota Nakama: Using music notation software to create large volumes of scores in a short turnaround time to meet the demanding schedules required for recordings and live performances.
Article about Mr. Jonathan Feist: Wrote and published a textbook on music notation through Berklee Press, the publishing division of Berklee College of Music. He also offers a 12-part online course on how to use music notation software.
The last of these, Mr. Jonathan Feist's article, is an example of this, and fortunately, part of the content is still available in the original English article by MakeMusic, the developer of Finale, as of September 16, 2024.
▼Jonathan Feist, Author of “Berklee Contemporary Music Notation” (the finale blog, January 16, 2018 Scott Yoho)
To translate this article into Japanese, a second interview with Feist was conducted with the cooperation of MakeMusic and Berklee College of Music. I recall that some of the content was similar to the article below.
▼Jonathan Feist on Wrapping His Head around Contemporary Music Notation (Berklee Online)
https://online.berklee.edu/takenote/jonathan-feist-wrapping-head-around-contemporary-music-notation/
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I don't remember exactly what articles have been published in Club Finale, but through participating in this conference, I realized that it is necessary to revive public information that will be useful to users of music notation software in the long term.
We would like to revive information that we are comfortable republishing from our company's perspective, little by little, while searching through my past memories.