Hello, hello! This week in ​Practical Counterpoint​, we begin the section on imitation, so you can look forward to hearing much about that.

This week I also am starting the ball rolling towards crowd-sourcing a library of high-quality scores in MuseScore format. We'll discuss this during Wednesday's MuseScore Café, and hopefully return to the subject in the weeks ahead. My goal is to eventually have a reliable way of finding the "best" MuseScore editions of any given piece for further study.

Mastering MuseScore

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MuseScore Café

This week in the MuseScore Café with Marc Sabatella, we discuss the idea of creating a free library of accurate and well-engraved editions of music in MuseScore format for study. Obviously, musescore.com is a place where such scores can be found, but with no organized system in place for quality assurance, it can be difficult to know which version of a given piece is the most reliable. There have been a number of attempts to organize something along these lines, but so far no clear solutions. Let's brainstorm and start working to put something in place!

The free MuseScore Café is live on Wednesday at 12:30 PM Eastern (16:30 GMT, or 17:30 during the winter months), and you can access past episodes in the archive.

Tip of the Week

MuseScore provides a very useful command called “repeat selection” (shortcut “R”) to quickly create a copy of a given selection. In this video post, I demonstrate how to use it.

Musicianship

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Music Master Class

This week in the Music Master Class with Marc Sabatella, we take a closer look at the coursework on imitation from the Practical Counterpoint​ course.

The free Music Master Class is live on Thursday at 12:30 PM Eastern (16:30 GMT, or 17:30 during the winter months), and you can access past episodes in the archive.

In Theory

April is “jazz appreciation month”, and although I’ve mostly been talking about counterpoint lately, I thought I’d focus on jazz this week with - you guessed it - a discussion of how jazz musicians can use the devices of counterpoint in their improvisation. In this video post, I show you real and tonal sequences as well as inversion can be used as melodic development techniques.