The Brussels Philharmonic and its Swiss music director Michel Tabachnik gave a concert of works by Wagner and Ravel yesterday that didn’t include a single sheet of music. It was a public relations exercise to tout its pioneering collaboration with Samsung and Belgian software startup NeoScores to make concerts fully digital.
Storing, copying, marking up and carrying musical scores is cumbersome, but, unless a sudden gust of air conditioning descends on a stage, very reliable. Anyone who has tried reading music off a tablet computer knows how easy it is to flip past the right spot accidentally, or have the screen suddenly go to sleep at the wrong moment.
NeoScores claims it has solved these problems with its new software, and the Brussels Phil is the willing guinea pig for this beta version. There is even a special operating mode for the tablet that will prevent any extra-musical activity, such as email or text message pings. Besides eliminating the usual sources of error, NeoScores claims its software allows a conductor to instantly distribute notes to individual players or sections, and players can share notes on the fly.
Samsung’s contribution is 100 Galaxy Note 10.1 tablets with 16GB of storage. This should, according to a press release issued by the orchestra yesterday, allow for storage of “hundreds” of orchestra scores. Interestingly, Samsung’s English-language website only offers a 32GB version of the Android-powered tablet, which weighs 597 g — less than a single volume of Beethoven piano sonatas. The battery is supposed to be good for 540 minutes of video playback, so it passes the Siegfried test.
Emmanual Sproelants, the Brussels Phil librarian, believes that, once the organization’s scores are scanned into a digital archive, it will be able to save 25,000 euro (about $33,000) over the course of its 100-concert season.
Neither NeoScores nor the orchestra were clear about the length of the test period or when the software may become commercially available. A free app offering a simple viewer is currently available from the Belgian startup here.