Ditching Sheet Music for the iPad - on the Concert Stage
I just played my first symphony concert using an iPad instead of sheet music - and it worked!
While this practice is not crazy-unusual, I did need to drum up some courage and expand my comfort zone to do so. And it was also novel enough to draw some attention from curious colleagues - two iPads on the music stand?
Violinists Laurie Niles and Paul Henning at Saturday's Long Beach Symphony Orchestra concert - and our music stand with two iPads!
While many of my symphony colleagues use the iPad for practice parts, it is less common in rehearsals or concerts. I've seen it used in chamber music concerts and recitals, but more seldomly at a symphony concert. I've never actually seen a symphony concert where the entire orchestra was on the iPad.
This interesting situation came about when, on the morning of the first rehearsal for last Saturday's Long Beach Symphony Orchestra concert, my stand partner, the excellent and multi-talented violinist Paul Henning, sent me a friendly email. "Looking forward to playing with you at LBSO! I’m planning on using my iPad for the rehearsals and concert. Are you using an iPad yet, or will you be reading off the paper part?"
Hmmmm - intriguing!
I was subbing in the first fiddles - I had been invited one week before the first rehearsal, so my preparation time had been abbreviated. There was a lot to get into the fingers - Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" (my muscle memory is for the second part), Bernstein's "West Side Story" (happily in my fingers fairly recently), a Chopin piano concerto, and a new piece by Sydney Guillaume, "Lavil Okap" (lovely!).
These days it is commonplace for symphonies to disseminate "practice parts" digitally, with the option to get paper copies for those who wish. Ideally, several weeks before the concert those practice parts are available online, at which point it is pretty simple to download into a program called forScore on the iPad.
The nice thing about using digital downloads is that you don't have to wait for anyone to send you music. So in this case, I downloaded everything into my iPad within hours of agreeing to the gig.
By the time I received Paul's email, I'd been working on the music all week - marking my fingerings and other reminders (accidentals, etc.) in red, to make it easier to see my markings when I came to rehearsal the first day. (This is another nice thing about the iPad - you can mark the music up in lots of different colors - black, red, blue. There is even a setting to mark in white, which you can use to blot out messy markings or fingerings you don't like.)
Typically, the physical sheet music is waiting on the stand for the first rehearsal - that music stays with that stand. Both stand partners can mark up the music - the outside player's markings go on the top and the insider's on the bottom. I was sitting on the inside for this one, so I had made all my iPad markings on the bottom, so that I would get used to seeing them there.
So wait, use the iPad for the rehearsals and for the concert? No actual shared sheet music on the stand? How would we do this? I admitted to Paul, I'd never done that before.
A little background: I set up my iPad for music during the pandemic, and once work resumed, I started making the switch from requesting the thick pile of paper-music practice parts to simply downloading it onto my iPad.
I bought the pedal page-turner (a Firefly) in 2021, and I learned to use it while practicing orchestra parts on the iPad. I have a relatively old iPad (a 2nd generation iPad Pro from 2017), so at a certain point I splurged on an old-style Apple pencil to help me mark the parts. (I tried a generic computer pen but it just didn't work!) I don't know exactly when I completely switched over, but at this point I download all of my orchestra practice parts on the iPad. It's a rare gig that doesn't disseminate them digitally, before the first rehearsal.
The idea of using the iPad for a concert was interesting, but I felt unsure. I'm pretty clumsy with the page-turn pedal. While practicing I tend to stand, and I've occasionally stepped on the page-turner pedal accidentally in moments of over-enthusiasm - or I've hit it on the wrong side and gone backwards a page, or stepped too hard and jumped four pages forward. That would not be good, during a concert!
I quizzed Paul a little bit: "Have you done this before with a stand partner? Do you just do the two iPads side-by-side on one stand?"
Paul said that he'd used the iPad in concert a number of times, and he offered a few ways we could work it. One way would be to share the iPad, and then still have the inside player (traditionally the page-turner) operate the page-turning pedal. The other way would be to have the two iPads side-by-side on the stand, with each of us operating our own page-turn pedal.
Since I'd already made quite a lot of markings, and it seemed a bit weird to be putting my markings into someone else's iPad, we opted for the side-by-side iPads, even though that would also mean two pedals for page turns.
So I charged my iPad, packed up my Firefly page turner and headed to the first rehearsal. Once I arrived, the folder with the sheet music was sitting on the stand, then we loaded the stand with my iPad on, then Paul's - and then the stand started to sink downward from all that weight! So our first lesson was: take the sheet music folder off the stand. Two iPads is the maximum weight that the music stand can hold.
Paul had a different kind of page-turner, a Donner. A few people asked if the bluetooth page turners ever get mixed up, like my page turner could accidentally turn Paul's page. The answer is no: the page turner pairs with your particular device, similar to a speaker. And good news: I found it a lot easier to operate the page-turner while sitting.
Paul also had a different method for marking his music than I did; instead of having an Apple pencil, he simply used his fingers. When he needed to mark something, he stretched it (as you do on your phone, to make something look bigger) then he made the marking with his index finger. After that he pinched it back to the normal size. I'll say, his markings were a lot neater than mine, which tended to be a little wobbly with the Apple pencil.
Also, he'd already marked his part with the intention of using it for the concert, whereas I'd marked mine as with the intention of transferring certain markings to another part. So he had "cleaned up" the music - made it so nice! He had whited-out sloppy and distracting things in the music such as scrawled bowings, slash marks, multiple erasures - and he had replaced these with neatly-written markings. He had a system for the colors. Instead of everything in red as I had (because of my intent of transferring them) - he had fingerings and bowings in black, with some underlines and emphases in other colors. And during the rehearsal, if our conductor (Eckart Preu) was asking for something to be less or softer, he marked this request in blue, if it was to be louder, it was in red.
Meanwhile, I was just trying to keep up and turn the pages at the right time! Also, when there was a bowing change (as happens fairly frequently in rehearsals), I really had to fish around for where this was on my part. When everyone's paper music is open to the same two pages, you can generally see that the people are writing something new in, say, the upper left-hand corner of the music. This navigation did not translate to the iPad, where you just see one page at a time. I think I would get used to this, but sitting last desk, I struggled to get all the changes in my part.
The next day, as I practiced at home before rehearsal, I realized that I could be looking at this iPad thing in a whole different way. Seeing the iPad music as a "practice part," my feelings ran along these lines: I'll write my markings and fingerings in red, and if I'm lucky I can copy the most crucial of those in the shared sheet music. However, I don't want to annoy my stand partner, so I'm not necessarily going to mark everything. No weird fingerings, nothing too fussy, and don't over-do it with too many markings. And nothing embarrassing, like the fact that I keep missing that one D flat even though it is clearly in the key signature.
But freed of the "practice part" mentality, this part could be my own creation - it could be exactly what I need to see in order for me to play the best concert I could play. Definitely I can mark in the D flat, and a lot else.
Suddenly every obsessive-compulsive instinct that I've ever had began to come out. I could white out all the ugly and distracting markings. I could neaten up the fingerings and bowings that were already correct but didn't look good. I didn't need to put the fingerings on the top or bottom based on sitting inside or outside - I could put them anywhere! That means I could put them wherever I could see them best. I didn't need to worry about navigating two sets of fingerings and knowing which was mine, either. I could also use the color to a different end, like Paul was doing. A little bit of blue would help me see a "subito piano" or other such thing more easily. Wow, this was cool!
However - I didn't really have time for all of that, in this case. Just as I started getting carried away, I realized I was running out of practice time. I'd better just practice the notes. I wasn't going to be able to make my part all that it could be. My fingerings would have to stay in red. But if I did this in the future - if I had the parts more than a week in advance and I knew I'd be using the iPad - then I would really make the part nice for myself. This was a comforting idea.
In subsequent rehearsals I had a few more revelations: First, it's easier and way less disruptive to use the page-turner than it is to stop, place my bow with my violin in my left hand and use the right hand to reach across my stand partner and physically turn the page dozens of times during the course of the music. Especially as the inside player (the official page-turner), I began to feel much more settled because I didn't have to use my hands and arms to turn the pages, and I didn't have to reach across my stand partner.
Also, we each had our own physical space, more so than when sharing the music. Sharing the music, the person on the right has to angle their scroll so they can see, but so that the other person's bow won't bump into them. It's pretty subconscious, but it's still an issue. It's different with everyone, depending on people's eyesight and whether they wish to sit closer or farther from the music.
And speaking of eyesight, right away Paul showed me a nice trick where you can crop the music within forScore, which makes it all appear a little bigger on the iPad. Also, you can brighten your screen if you need a little boost visually.
In between each rehearsal I did have to remember one very important thing: charge the iPad! Let's just say, you never have to remember to charge your sheet music. But for each rehearsal and for the concert, the iPad started at 100 percent battery and ended around 40 percent. If I'd forgotten to charge it one day, the iPad would not have made it through the required two-and-a-half hours.
How did it go for the concert? It went well, though there was one time when my iPad tried to "go to sleep"! Typically, a phone or iPad is set to "go to sleep" after just two minutes of disuse, to save battery power. The screen fades a bit in warning, then it shuts off. I learned that this doesn't work so well for music-reading - it's like having narcoleptic sheet music. So I had changed my settings so that it goes to sleep after 10 minutes, which is usually fine. It resets as soon as you turn a page or touch the screen in any way. However, in this case, our conductor gave a bit of a loquacious introduction before the Chopin concerto, and my screen had been on through all of that before we started playing. So halfway through the first page it started to go grey - I had a moment of mild panic! But I just reached out and touched the screen with my index finger, and it brightened back to normal.
The other small drawback for me is a little more esoteric. Reading from separate music, I didn't quite feel that mind-meld connection that can happen from being "on the same page" - it seems to me that there is some kind of camaraderie in looking at and playing from the same music. Although - I can't say this always happens. Sometimes you are in sync and sometimes not. Sometimes it's just "we both did the wrong bowing - they changed it and it's wrong in our part..." and it's just nice that you have two people in on making it all work well - you aren't in it alone. But I'll say, Paul still helped me a lot in this new adventure!
I want to mention one more thing about having music digitized and in the iPad - it's a little personal. In January when we evacuated our home due to the Eaton Canyon fire, I could not take my library of music, but I took my iPad. In that moment, I wished that I had digitized my entire library. We were lucky; others weren't. But I will be working to digitize my music beyond the orchestra parts, starting with my teaching materials and my own parts for concertos and Bach.
So overall, I think the iPad works very, very well in the concert setting. In my case, it freed me up physically and it allowed for more clear and personalized markings in my part. With more practice, I think I would start feeling very comfortable using the iPad on stage, and I would enjoy the advantages of being able to customize the part for my own playing. I will not be surprised to see more musicians and more musical ensembles adopting the iPad for use in the concert setting.
You might also like:
- V.com weekend vote: Have you ever performed using a tablet for sheet music?
- Discussion: Going Digital: Which iPad sheet music apps / page turners are everyone using these days?
- The Virtual Musician: A Guide to Using Apps, Tablets and Technology for Performance and Teaching
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Replies
Great article! I have used my iPad Pro with my AirTurn Duo pedal and ForScore Pro version in orchestra and chamber music performances quite a lot over the past 6 years (and longer than that when I was a pianist for a violin studio and had tons of Suzuki and Barber book scans taking the place of a bag full of piano parts).
In orchestra I use it only when my stand partner is ok with it; most have been but not always. I have never used two on a stand, however, so it was interesting to read about that. The concertmaster of my community orchestra always uses it and it is very helpful as he can easily send out any bowing changes throughout the rehearsal cycle. And in the past few years I have seen several members of the Baltimore Symphony in the string sections use iPads in performances and most soloists who use music at all have had iPads onstage.
Besides making sure your iPad is charged before rehearsal and turning off notifications, screen shutoff settings, etc., I highly recommend having a portable battery on hand in case of emergency. When I had the opportunity to perform in Italy in July of 2022, we were in extremely hot temperatures and that drained our iPads super quickly. Lesson learned!
Awesome!
Laurie,
Very interesting post. I use Forscore on a large Ipad; I like it a lot.
Regarding ipad 'sleep' - Forscore has a setting to prevent an Ipad from sleeping. Here's AI instructions on what to set:
####################
Open the forScore app: on your iPad.
Tap the center of the screen: to display the navigation bar.
Tap the toolbox icon: (it looks like a red box with a white toolbox inside) in the top-right corner of the screen.
From the menu that appears, select "Settings".
In the Settings panel, tap on "General".
Turn off the "Auto-lock": toggle switch.
With this setting disabled, forScore will override your iPad's auto-lock feature and prevent it from going to sleep as long as the app is open and visible on the screen
#############
Give it a try; for me, my Ipad never tries to sleep as I use it for a long practice session.
Maybe I'm a Luddite (I am fairly computer savy, however), but I always feel a bit nervous for performers using tablets. I've attended a few recitals where the tablet crashed or rebooted and the performance came to a (not quite) screeching halt. I suppose it's not a total disaster if it happens to an orchestral string player, but could be disaster for a principal wind player. For a pianist, I suppose tablets are better than having a human page turner lurking over their shoulder. Make sure all your settings are right, your battery's charged and your foot knows what it's doing. Good luck!
I do not hate when others use it, but I absolutely abhor when it's used 100% in lieu of scores as a sort of requirement, because I strongly believe no one should be forced to own gear they would otherwise never use day to day. I am very much computer literate, just not an iPad user-and I wouldn't use my Surface Pro for this purpose either (yes, have one serving as a super portable PC.) I honestly love physical scores, and hate PDFs-but that is just me, so do not take it personally. :)
Richard,
I’ve been playing off an iPad in orchestra, chamber, opera, and solo settings for more than 10 years. I have never had any of the situations you mentioned happen to me, nor have I seen it happen. I have seen many problems with people using paper parts, however! Music falling off the stand during a page turn, turning too many pages, dropping folder full of unbound photocopied parts…
Laurie, if both players are using forscore, there is an add-on app called cue that costs just a few bucks, and allows you to treat the two side-by-side iPads as a double page. No modifications to the parts required.
I have found using the stamp facility in forscore to be superior to trying to scribble in the parts. Yes, it isn’t quite as fast, but the results are better. You can draw your own stamps, so the symbols will look just like they so in paper music you have marked. I really dislike the “marked in crayon” look that some people produce! I’ve occasionally taken a blank part and remarked it in particularly egregious cases. Of course, the chief offenders in my experience also supply lousy bowings ??
Another handy feature is using multiple layers for annotation. I’ll do a score layer for fixes to the part (like wrong notes, missing accidentals, etc.). Then as appropriate I’ll do score or page layers for personal markings that I might not wish to always have — you can switch their visibility on and off
One last thing: I’ve got a spare iPad Pro that I take with me to orchestra rehearsals. I load it up with all of the string parts for a set (we distribute our music electronically), and I can just hand it to someone who has shown up without some necessary part. Much easier than carrying around a box of parts! And my iPad doesn’t weigh any more, even though it has 4,356 pieces of music loaded… When a student comes for a lesson and he’s got some new arrangement, I can pull out the original part and we can see how the arrangement compares,
It maybe isn’t ideal for everyone. My 95-year-young pianist seems to do something to screw up page turns frequently, so we gave up on the experiment. He’s not so great at turning paper pages, either, so a human page-turner is the solution. I need one, too — I find myself tapping my foot when it is time to turn the page, even when I have a paper part on the stand ??
I got my first smartphone this year. It's a bit of a wait until the end of the century to get something as advanced as this. Let me get the footpedals for my Yamaha piano first.
The expense of it is a concern for many - and certainly if an orchestra were to require this in a professional setting, they'd need to spring for the iPads! In my case, I inherited the nice, big-screen iPad from my father-in-law when he passed away, and that made it easier for me to spring for all the other things I needed like the page-turner and Apple pencil. However if I'm going to digitize my library I might get a more updated iPad.
Isn't the musical "page" itself an unwanted hangover from pre-digital antiquity? Surely the next thing will be a device that automatically follows and displays the music (as many staves as are considered desirable) as a continuous thread.
I'm intrigued to know if such a thing already exists and if not, why not? If AI can recognise human faces surely it can recognise music by sound and match it with the score?
I'm holding my breath for Joe 90 glasses.
In early days of digital devices we did not think much about fires. These days, with aging lithium ion batteries, it is a concern. It is exacerbated by the fact the batteries are not designed to be removed by the consumer.
They are not devices you can just put in storage. I would not advise keeping them with your violin.
So, all the more power to people using them. But be careful and rember to care for your ipads or other devices.
Is it easier to use an ipad for music reading if you are playing from a pdf version?
Bruce, forscore, the most widely-used music display app for iPad (but also runs on the Mac!) is essentially a glorified pdf viewer. If someone mails me a pdf file, I tap once to open the attachment, and once more to transfer it to forscore. That’s all that must be done; one might want to add some metadata to make it easier to find, but that is optional.
The Henle library app is not a pdf viewer, and only works with music files sold by [checks notes] Henle. It has some nice features, but the one I use most often is the export to pdf option, so I can put it in forscore!
People can and do use free options for viewing pdf music files, but I think that is a false economy, even though the price is now about double te $10 I paid long ago. It can be done, but it does not look as convenient. YMMV.
Steve, I don’t know of any application that follows written music, but Shazam appears to be able to match the lyrics on the screen with the sung lyrics
Rosemary - I asked google if AI was capable of following classical music and answer came there none. Maybe it all happens too fast for current processors? We can infer from this that AI has no musical "appreciation" which is critically dependant on how note patterns vary over time. Shazam does seem to be able to analyse chords for their constituent notes and instruments but probably isn't quick enough to be able to do this on the fly. And matching the ongoing music with the printed score also seems to be a long way off. So there are some things that human beings can still beat the computer at!
I’m the principal violist in a couple of the orchestras I play in. Most of the younger players, and a growing number of older ones like me, are playing from iPads. One of the benefits is that I can air drop my bowed/marked up copies to most of the section. If they’re also using forScore, I can air drop the forScore files and they can edit the markings as if they had added them themselves. For players who use paper, I can save an annotated PDF and email it to them directly from my iPad.
Our quartet went off paper over five years ago. We use an iPad app called OnSong. We each use a specialized music stand that works perfectly. Onsong doesn’t turn pages, but scrolls, even on the longest songs and tunes.
One of our cellists uses an ONYX BOOX
It looks pretty good.
Rosemary, there is software that follows your playing. Two apps that provide such accompaniment are Cadenza and MyPianist.
Cadenza Performer sounds terrific in theory but unfortunately isn't available for PC. Has anyone here actually used it?
This is a very good and detailed description of just about all of the pros and cons with using an iPad. Both my kids still have their gen 2 iPads like Laurie's, both still hanging in there. I highly recommend carrying a small 10k mAh power brick and cable with you in your gear bag, especially as the battery ages! Similarly, come up with a system to keep track of when you last changed the batteries in your page turner (e.g. note on a piece of masking tape inside the battery cover).
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September 29, 2025 at 08:50 PM · No. 1 advice I have for people who want to perform with Ipads -- learn about ForScore's half page turn feature. Not only can you half-turn so you preview the next page, you can set the break point for the turn with your finger on the screen so you can turn exactly at the right point on the page.
You need to make sure the Ipad doesn't go into lockscreen while it's running ForScore, you can set that in settings. You also need to make sure the Ipad doesn't do any notifications. Just make sure notifications are off for every application.
Different opinions about bluetooth pedals but professionals I know are increasingly going to Donner and similar design pedals because the pedals have the right amount of height and size to minimize the possibility of accidental double-taps which can be a problem with the Butterfly design. Again, be sure you have the right setting, you do NOT want the pedal to keep turning if you keep pressing.