Publishing musical materials has always been a serious challenge. Especially for niche musical subjects where there isn’t a large enough market to justify high production costs. This has led to an embarrassingly high number of musical resources aimed at beginners. Large publishing houses have to make money, and your niche book idea doesn’t hit the numbers they’re looking for. But they would certainly greenlight a new beginners book as long as the color scheme and the graphics are on point. This article proposes a new, technologically enabled way for musical documents to be made that doesn’t require a large publisher’s production staff.
Producing and editing books used to take a very long time. You had to manually place every letter and graphic on the page, you had to take on the hefty expense of printing copies beforehand, and you had to figure out how to find people interested in purchasing your book. And after all the time and effort you put into the project, you still lost your money. Fortunately, times have changed dramatically. Today you can produce a higher quality text than any publisher can muster, you can do that for zero cost (outside of your time), and can market effortlessly, with things like social media and Patreon. Another vast improvement, if directly making money with the book isn’t your goal, is you can give the book away for free. It’s much easier to market (and sell) a free product.
The concept of free resources may make you suspicious, but in the modern world of academia, we are rapidly approaching a time where every educational resource is free for everyone. The movement towards free and collaboratively sourced resources for academia was spearheaded by programmers. They are the hackers, the real anti-establishment types. Wherever large institutions take advantage of their customers, programmers soon arrive to disrupt and overthrow that power dynamic.
Programmers have created a number of free resources that are relevant to us as music educators:
GitHub is a platform for hosting your computer code in a way that makes it easy for a large number of people to work together on that code. We can use it to collaboratively create our musical documents.
LilyPond is a music notation program whose user interface is a text file. Because it’s a text file, it can be treated just like any other piece of code and that works great on GitHub.
LaTeX (Lah-Tek) is a document preparation program, similar to something like Word, but because it’s just a text file as well, it integrates perfectly with GitHub and allows for seamless collaboration online.
Continuous Integration is a programming concept that means that every time an update to the program is checked into GitHub, a new version of the document is created and published automatically. This means that all the collaborators on a project will always have the latest version of the document available for review after every code update.
Visual Studio Code is a program for writing computer code. Programmers use VS Code everyday to make edits to their codebase. We can use it in the same way for our projects. It’s very user-friendly and has useful things like a built-in terminal (for inputting commands) and a Git client for checking in your code changes to GitHub.
Docker is a program that allows you to easily create a second computer, called a Docker image, inside of your computer. This sounds weird but it’s really helpful when collaborating on projects like these because it ensures that everyone is building the musical document in exactly the same way, this guarantees that if you build the document on your computer it will always look the same as the document that the continuous integration automatically generates on GitHub.
LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are also quite useful, they aren’t free, but something like ChatGPTs Codex is actually quite good at working with this kind of musical document system and at understanding music to a decent enough level where it’s not a waste of time. Today, something like ChatGPTs Codex is $20 a month and is fairly valuable for doing things like fixing styling of the document, or troubleshooting errors. It can also be a VS Code replacement, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Let Me Help You Get Started
I’ve made a template for you. Go here to get started on your new book or music resource. It takes care of the lion’s share of the complexity for you. It already has a continuous integration set up, it already creates a GitHub repository for you if you click the “use this template” button. All you have to do is replace the text content and write your music using LilyPond. I’ve even set up the LaTeX document to have things like automatic bibliography, glossary, and a list of musical examples in the front. I’ve even included a bunch of pre-styled components for you to use, like stylized lists, easy ways to integrate musical examples, support for inline musical examples and more. I’ve even put my email in the README on GitHub. Let me know if you’d like some help.