Hello! This week marks the official conclusion of the ​Practical Counterpoint​ course. Thanks to everyone who has taken part in this journey! On Thursday, we will be checking out the completed fugues (and works-in-progress) in Music Master Class and otherwise celebrating all we have accomplished, so I hope you can join us - and remember, these sessions are open to everyone.
​
I will share more information shortly on what's next for the Musicianship Workshop (an exclusive benefit of Gold-level membership), but you can expect the lessons, demonstrations, and projects will continue. We'll just take a more relaxed pace and cover a wider range of topics.

Mastering MuseScore

If you are interested in getting the most out of the world's most popular music notation software, join our community with a Mastering MuseScore membership for the most comprehensive training & expert support available!

MuseScore Café

This week in the MuseScore Café with Marc Sabatella, we continue our third-Wednesday "score of the month" series. I'll be entering a Bach fugue into MuseScore and demonstrating all the techniques I use along the way.

Tip of the Week

Have you ever selected a full measure and then tried to perform some operation that only works on a single note or rest? If so, you've seen the dreaded "No note or reset selected / Please select a note or rest and retry" error dialog. In this video post, I demonstrate my hack for quickly selecting the first note or rest of the measure (spoiler alert: it's "NN").

Musicianship

If you are serious about learning music - theory, composition, improvisation, and more - become a Gold-level member and receive access to all of our music courses and workshops, as well as exclusive benefits like my weekly Office Hours, in addition to our acclaimed Mastering MuseScore resources.

Music Master Class

This week in the Music Master Class with Marc Sabatella, we listen to and discuss the fugues created for the Practical Counterpoint​ course. This will wrap up our special focus on counterpoint, although I fully expect more fugues to be submitted over the coming weeks, and we'll be checking those out too.

In Theory

One of my pet peeves is the stereotypical Hollywood depiction of how authors begin writing a book: putting a sheet of blank paper into a typewriter (well, in older shows and movies anyhow; firing up the word processor in modern times) and then typing "Chapter 1" and waiting for the inspiration to strike. Almost no writers I know work that way, and the same for composers. It's normally more a process of collecting ideas and then refining and assembling them into a finished work. While it's possible to compose music starting at the top left hand corner and then just writing start to finish in the "Hollywood" stereotype fashion, fugues in particular benefit from doing some preparatory work up front. Since the whole piece will derive from a single theme called the "subject", it pays to spend time planning the subject and possibilities for its development before actually writing the initial measures. In this video post, I give a brief overview of what that process looked like for me in the creation of the fugue I wrote as a demonstration for my Practical Counterpoint course.