Classical Collection Inc.
About Us

England’s Queen Victoria was the first person to begin referring to herself in the plural: “We are not amused”.

Classical Collection Inc was started in 1994 by myself, John Montgomery, and a partner, another musician, who has since “bowed out” of the company. So “Classical Collection Inc. - about us” is really about me - so I’ll stop using the plural, so that I won’t be mistaken for Queen Victoria.

John Montgomery’s background
(Referring to myself in the 3rd person is better than in the plural - but from now on maybe I’ll stick to “I” and “me”.)

I began playing (I can’t really say “studying”) the Clarinet in Grade 5, adding the Saxophone & Flute five years later - eventually gaining an Associate of Music (in Clarinet Performance) from the Westren Ontario Conservatory of Music, a Bachelor of Music (in Music Education) and a Master of Music (in Music Theory) both from the University of Western Ontario (Canada).

After graduation I began a career, which continues today, as a freelance professional musician (Flute, Clarinet & Saxophone), private teacher/tutor and musical arranger/copyist.

It is this last area (musical arranger/copyist) that brought about Classical Collection Inc. After decades of work doing hand copying of music, I began noticing more and more computer generated scores & parts - which were beginning to look very professional. Computer scores & parts started out as very “clunky” and difficult to read dot-matrix printouts but quickly progressed to Laser and Ink Jet.

With handwritten parts, because it took years to gain a good “hand” (i.e., look), you could usually tell by the script (handwriting) how good (or bad) an arrangement would be, before you even played it. In addition, errors or ambiguities because of illegibly in the parts were not acceptable, especially at the professional level. However, with the advent of good computer notation programs and printers in the 1990’s, an amateur could now produce a score & parts that actually looked better than the most seasoned professional’s handwritten copies.

Because of this in late 1993 I began using the music notation program Finale . My original idea was to enter complete orchestral scores of Flute or Clarinet solos and use Finale to create piano reductions. But when I heard the playback of the complete scores with each instrument on a different channel, each with different pan (right/left spacial placement) - it seemed anticlimactic to create a reduction - why not have the entire score as an accompaniment.

Saving the scores as MIDI files (MIDI is an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface) would allow a Soloist to use a MIDI player to play back the complete score (with dynamics, pan, etc.) and have the option of changing the speed without changing the pitch - and so Classical Collection Inc was born.

Our first publications (oh no, there’s that plural again - but I guess it is alright, at that point in time there were two of us) were Volumes of Flute & Clarinet (and eventually Saxophone) Solos with MIDI Accompaniment on a 3.5 inch floppy disc (I don’t even know if they exist any more!). This series continued and expanded from Collections of Elementary & Intermediate Level Solos to Advanced Level Books of individual major works. See: Other Flute Solos with Full Orchestral Accompaniment , Other Clarinet Solos with Full Orchestral Accompaniment and Sax Solos.

But MIDI was a “hard sell”. The ability to change the speed without changing the pitch and to start or stop wherever you wanted was available on almost any MIDI player and there were many free ones available for download. However, how good (or bad) the playback sounded did depend on what was being used to produce the sounds. A good sound module sounded, well ... good; samples sounded like real instruments, because, of course, that’s what they were - samples of real players. But most people used synthetic electronic sounds - which in the 1990’s ranged from awful to really incredibly awful (“Is that a kazoo, an accordion or a clarinet?” - the answer was often “Yes”, because it was indeed the same sound being used for all three).

By 2002 Finale’s softsynth used for playback had improved so dramatically that I began using it to make audio CDs of the MIDI accompaniments. The series now comes with a CD containing an audio version of each solo, with and without the solo part, in addition to the MIDI files.

A new series called Exam Preparation Kits (see Other Flute Solos with Full Orchestral Accompaniment and Other Clarinet Solos with Full Orchestral Accompaniment ) was also begun in 2002. This series comes with the Solo Flute or Clarinet part, piano accompaniment part, etc.., and an audio CD.

Again Finale’s playback capabilities and sounds have improved each year - beginning in 2005 it including actual sample sounds of Garritan Personal Orchestra.

The realism of the playback sounds on an audio CD is fantastic, but I still missed the ability to be able to change the speed.

In 2004, MakeMusic , the manufacturer of Finale and SmartMusic asked me to become a Clinician, demonstrating and showing how to better use both Finale and SmartMusic. I had used Finale for over a decade with Classical Collection Inc publications and also as a freelance arranger and copyist for many organizations from Symphonic Orchestras to Professional Musical Theatre. The Clinicians training session in November 2004 was my first direct exposure to SmartMusic and I was quite impressed by it.

I immediately began using SmartMusic in my private teaching (using a lap top computer) and began adapting many of the Classical Collection Inc solos and accompaniments to SmartMusic. In 2005 I became a MakeMusic Clinician (the 2nd in Canada) and began doing clinics demonstrating both Finale and SmartMusic.

Classical Collection Inc latest series: Flute Solos with SmartMusic Accompaniment and Clarinet Solos with SmartMusic Accompaniment is the result of “all of the above”.

I am able to use Finale to create both top level professional printed Flute and Clarinet Solo parts and the SmartMusic smp files to play the Full Orchestral Accompaniments
- the best of all worlds.

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