The ‘Working in Harmony’ app provides automatic feedback on users’ harmonic analyses.

About

‘Four Score and More’ is a social enterprise founded in 2018 which is dedicated to providing high-quality, digital resources for the teaching and learning of music, particularly music theory.

We aim to provide resources that:

  • are immediately useful;
  • save teachers’ preparation time so they can focus on teaching;
  • enhance the learning experience, and / or enable a wider range of approaches;
  • help to democratise access by being free for all and accompanied by user-friendly instructions. We aim to enable anyone interested to develop their skills for free.

Resources

Click here for the full listings of resources we currently offer or are actively working on.

Participation Projects

We are also proud to run participation projects whereby those learning music can also contribute to these kinds of projects by learning, while they learn. Click here if you’d like more information or to get involved.

What’s in a name?

‘Four score’ is an old-fashioned method of counting, where a ‘score’ is a group or set of twenty. So, when Lincoln opened the Gettysburg Address by talking about the founding of America ‘four score and seven years ago’, he meant 87 years before 1863, i.e. 1776. Therefore, ‘four score and more’ amounts to ‘more than 80’ which, in musical terms is resonant as the number of keys on a modern, full-size piano (there’s some variety, but they’re mostly all in that range of 80+).

Clearly, it also puns on ‘for scores and more’, which summarises the initiative’s core project, focused on scores but also including other forms of engagement with music and musical pedagogy. Nerdier still, even the logo puns on the idea of 4+, using the figured bass for an augmented 4th, enlarging it, and placing it within the stave to make it look like a treble clef.

Anyway, hopefully it’s a memorable title, and a bit of fun.

People

Speaking of names, please click here to read all about the great people and funders behind ‘Four Score and More’. Here’s a spoiler:

Cambridge logo Cornell logo

… and more

Clearly, Four Score and More can only provide for part of your music theory needs!

… and we are not the only group applying computational approaches to music in interesting ways.

For more links and information on both, please see our ‘Muso Repo’ page.

Four Score For-Profit

Apart from the core mission of Four Score and More to democratise access to music theory for free for all, Mark Gotham offers for-profit consultancy in computational approaches to musical questions personally. He (I) will gladly provide introductions to the wider Four Score and More team and network where relevant.

Topics include (but are not limited to) computational / data-driven approaches to:

  • teaching music;
  • understanding and visualising musical structure;
  • automatic composition with ‘AI’ (machine learning);
  • concert programming.

Current examples include a major project funded by Deutsche Telekom and to create a realisaton of Beethoven’s unfinished (barely begun!) 10th symphony. I am the ‘computational musicologist’ in the team, supporting composer Walter Werzowa, machine learning for generative art expert, Ahmed Elgammal, and others. Other project advisors include Christine Siegert, head of research at the Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, and the pianist-musicologist Robert Levin.

You can read Deutsche Telekom’s statement here and here is a sample of press reactions from: