Hello! It's September, which means back to school for many of us - whether you're a teacher like me, or a student, or a parent, that's a big deal. I wish you all great success in the coming academic year!

MuseScore Café

This week in the MuseScore Café with Marc Sabatella, we look at the various ways one can use MuseScore in an educational setting. And I'll show you how the features I demonstrate can be useful to everyone, not just teachers and students!

Tip of the Week

MuseScore comes with a small handful of plugins, and there are dozens more available to download and install from musescore.org. I've talked about plugins before in this column, but today I want to tell you about one that comes pre-installed and that many of you in the education field (particular general / primary school education) will find especially interesting. Its called colornotes, and it does just what it says - it colors notes. You do need to enable it via Plugins / Plugin Manager before you can use it. Once enabled, select the music you want to color (e.g., Ctrl+A or Cmd+A to select all) and run the plugin via Plugins / Notes / Color Notes, and you'll see everything colored according to the familiar Chroma-Notes scheme used in Boomwhackers and other instruments designed for children. Combine that with the facility to add note names to the noteheads (via the the "Head scheme" setting in the Inspector) and to produce large print music (via Format / Page Settings) and you're in business:

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Music Master Class

This week we continue looking at entries from the reharmonization challenge and talk more about harmony in general.

In Theory

Last week I invited to you consider which of two musical excerpts weas from Charlie Parker and which was from J.S. Bach. It was great to see the speculation and discussion about this on the community site, but now it's time to officially give the answer. In the following video, I show where both excertps come from, where the noteworthy points of similarity are, what might have tipped me off as to the difference, and what you can learn from this:

I'd love to hear your feedback, and I encourage you to continue this discussion in the community!