The iPad is helping shift how musicians approach their sheet music. Where once it was necessary to carry around large collection of scores from a myriad of pieces, it's now possible to carry your entire repertoire around in a single tablet. Instead of graphite, wood, and rubber, musicians now use Pencils made of plastic and silicon, made for touch screens rather than paper.
From The New York Times:
Ms. Wu takes pride in being an "early adopter" of the iPad and can rattle off its benefits to the traveling musician. By her own count, she is performing 42 works this summer. In the past, the attendant sheet music would have filled three quarters of a suitcase. Now she carries an entire library in a sleek tablet. Page turns have become quiet and elegant thanks to a wireless pedal. (Where her enemies were once awkward page turners, they're now Chinese concert halls with Bluetooth blockers.) She needn't worry about losing her scores or seeing the paper deteriorate over the course of a long tour. And in master classes, she scribbles notes for her students onto her tablet, saving a separate file for each player.
But it's not just in ease of use where digital tools are proving their value. Musicians are now increasingly able to read their music from digital versions of their original manuscripts. And because of this, more musicians are getting to see and study the original scores, connecting them more to the history of a work.
