One promise of digital course
material is its potential to provide students with interactive content that
engages in multiple ways. That could look something like The Mozart Project.
The Mozart Project is an e-book and
mobile app created by Pipedreams Media, which
spent 18 months collecting information on the composer. The e-book would run
nearly 430 pages if it were a traditional printed volume, according to the two
British app developers who helped create it.
“It looks and behaves more like an
app than like a conventional e-book, and it is part of a growing trend in
hybrid apps, e-books, and what were formerly known as record albums, in which
new releases make the most of the multimedia capabilities of computers,
smartphones, and tablets,” wrote Allan Kozinn, music critic for The New YorkTimes.
The e-book contains more than three
hours of music, two hours of video, and exclusive commentary from top musicians
and composers from the classical world. It covers each phase of Mozart’s life
and times, with chapters that discuss different categories of his music.
There are plenty of illustrations,
examples of manuscripts, and pop-up reference material that are accessed by
touching bold-faced words and phrases in the text. There are also video
performances and documentaries that were filmed for the book, making it the
kind of resource that could easily find its way into a music-appreciation
classroom.
