Of all the jobs that computer-related technology has caused to disappear, one other may soon need to be added to the list:
Page turner.
Concertgoers are used to seeing a turner come on stage, trailing the pianist, then sit unobtrusively to his or her left, and rise to turn the pages of the music when the time comes.
It’s a job that is small but vital for musical continuity, but one musician has used today’s technology to do the work himself.
British pianist Sam Haywood, who’s currently touring with violinist Joshua Bell, has for about seven months now been putting all the scores he needs into his iPad2. He then props the iPad on the piano rack, and “turns” the scanned pages of those scores with a Bluetooth-enabled foot-pedal device.
“You’ve just got to make sure everything’s well-charged and that’s all, basically,” Haywood said last month. “It just sits there. There are two pedals, one for turning back, one for turning forward. And it’s great.”
Haywood, who’s in China this week for two recitals with Bell, also accompanied the violinist in a private concert for President Obama and Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping during Xi’s visit to the United States. He used the iPad setup for Bell’s recital at the Kravis Center at the end of January, two months after he first tried it out in New York.
“I guess the big psychological leap was using it in Carnegie Hall in November. I don’t think they’ve ever had anyone do that before. I guess it was just a statement of my belief in it,” he said.
Haywood loads his scores into his iPad2 using an app called forScore, which “has evolved amazingly over the past few years,” he said. “You can annotate there, you can write stuff – you can do anything practically you can with a paper score.” (Version 3.5 of the app, which came out Thursday, is available for $4.99).
“I’ve tried all the apps for preparing music on the iPad, and in my opinion, this one is leaps and bounds ahead of the others,” he said.
And it was while using forScore that he found the device that would let him turn pages himself without having to take his hands off the keyboard.
“It was on their website I noticed that there was this Bluetooth foot pedal which had just been invented. I thought, ‘Why not give it a go?’ So I ordered one. It’s been something I’ve been dreaming of for a long, long time, to be able to do this kind of thing,” Haywood said. “So I thought it was worth the risk, and it turned out to be great. It’s so neat, the whole thing. And I’m such a technophile, so to be able to use something like that on stage makes me very happy.”
The foot pedal is made by a Boulder, Colo.-based company called AirTurn Inc. The newest model of its BT-105 device, with comes with two ATFS-2 pedals, sells for $129.95. One of the founders of AirTurn is pianist and tech guru Hugh Sung, who has for years helped classical musicians integrate technology into their professional lives.
Haywood says it takes a little bit of time to scan long scores into the iPad, but it’s not onerous. And once everything’s in, it’s easier to concentrate on the music.
“I think there are real musical advantages as well, because there’s no interruption, there’s no kind of punctuation every few minutes of somebody getting up and turning a page. It’s much more seamless,” he said. “It allows you to see the music in a bigger chunk somehow psychologically. Also, there’s not this worry that [a page turner] might not do it when you want, or they might not do it at all in some cases.
“There’s all that worry taken out, and of course you need to be in the calmest state possible. Anything that can remove a degree of uncertainty is helpful,” Haywood said.
The same arrangement wouldn’t really work for Bell, though. “I think it might be more difficult for a violinist. As a pianist, you’re just sitting there, and it’s very easy to flick your left foot and operate it. But if you’re moving around a bit and you have to keep finding the pedal to stand on, I’m not sure I can see it working so well.”
Using the BT-105 adds icing to the cake of Haywood’s love of the iPad, the subject of which has him sounding like an Apple evangelist.
“The iPad is just the perfect traveling companion. I mean, you’ve got your books, you’ve got your videos, your scores which you can study on the plane. You can do your emails – just everything you’d want to do, you can do, and it’s such a neat, small device. You just pack it in your bag, and you don’t even notice it’s there,” said Haywood, who’s 39 and based in London.
“The battery life, too — you can fly all the way from London to California and there’d be no problem at all. So all these things combined make it indispensable,” he said. “When I first got it, I didn’t really know what I was going to do with it, but now I just can’t imagine life without it.”
He even appreciates Apple’s focus on aesthetics.
“And it looks so wonderful, too. Sometimes when I’m in the wings, and I look out and see it sitting there, it’s aesthetically very pleasing,” he said.
As of early February, Haywood had used the foot pedal-iPad set up more than 50 times in concert, with nothing untoward happening. But he did run into a situation once when a page turner seemed crestfallen when told her services wouldn’t be needed.
“There was one case, and I forget where it was, but she looked so disappointed, she’d been so looking forward to doing it, that I didn’t have the heart to use the iPad,” Haywood said. “So she actually did it.”
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Sam Haywood explains his iPad page-turning in this recent TEDx lecture in Asheville, N.C., which also contains performances of two works by Chopin: the Nocturne No. 8 (in D-flat, Op. 27, No. 2) and the Scherzo No. 1 (in B minor, Op. 20).