MuseScore and Garageband: Making Music with Technology By Courtney Naliboff


It is my incredibly lucky lot in life to be the music teacher for North Haven Community School. We’re the smallest public school in the state, and geographically isolated due to our location twelve and a half miles out in Penobscot Bay. Thanks to the Maine Learning Technology Initiative, however, each middle school student gets to use their own laptop, and thanks to other grant money, the elementary and high school stu- dents have them too. Access to this technology gives students opportunities to use music writing and re- cording software and share their projects.


In addition to more typical elementary music exploration, band, and chorus classes, I get to teach an ad- vanced music class to five interested middle school students. They have all studied music outside of school, and many of them attend music camps and festivals throughout the year. The class touches on advanced repertoire, music history, theory and analysis, composition and arranging.


For composition and arranging assignments, I have all of my students use MuseScore. MuseScore is a free cross platform music notation program. The software was discovered by one of my students last year. She had taken an interest in composition, and was tired of writing by hand. She did her research, and rather than pay for a better-known notation program, she downloaded MuseScore to her home computer and her laptop. At the time, the school had a site license for Finale Notepad. When the license expired this year, I had all of the students switch over to MuseScore.


Using a notation program, rather than writing music by hand, opens up tremen- dous opportunities for sharing music. For an arrangement assignment in which small groups of students each took on 16 bars of “In the Mood,” they were able to email drafts to each other, edit for consis- tency on the go, and eventually combine their scores into one without cutting, past- ing, or photocopying. Part extraction is simple as well. Eliminating the tedious layout issues of handwritten music makes composition and sharing parts more ac- cessible to a broader range of students.


MuseScore has other advantages as well. I work with a high school senior who is writing and recording original songs for his senior project. Rather than tabs or lead sheets, he is writing detailed scores for all of his compositions. This talented and confident student is, among


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