Quote:
Originally Posted by 4691mls
I've never understood why solo performers are supposed to play from memory. I've known otherwise excellent musicians who just don't happen to have a good memory. I would much prefer to watch & listen to a confident performance using the music than a performance with memory glitches and restarts.
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Probably because by the time you are ready to perform as a solo performer, you have already practised the given piece so many times it would be surprising if you didn't know it by heart. Or rather, "by your fingers", since as the story goes, if you cut off a musician's head during the performance, his fingers will still continue playing for quite a while. I am an amateur musician myself, but I already reached a level with quite a few pieces that my fingers can automatically play the music and I can be reading a book at the same time.
Nonetheless, I don't think this particular device is up to its intended purpose. There are too many flaws already mentioned in this thread, to which I'll add just one. This is the same flaw that many e-learning textbooks share. They are laid out and devised by people who have experience mostly with paper textbooks, so they actually replicate in digital all the limitations of the "analogue" world. One example would be the idea of "repeats", "codas" etc. While on paper they need to be marked with special signs and the artist has to flip pages to and fro, in digital they should be treated more or less as "shadow copies" (as they are calles in some DAW apps) so no returns or flipping back should ever be needed.
But this won't happen unless music publishing houses completely revise their philosophy (perceiving sheet music as a logical structure, not as a visual approximation of music). And I don't believe this is going to happen in any foreseeable future.