Virtuoso Publishing

The history of The Virtuoso International School of Music began in 1996 through the work of two brothers Mark and Michael Sandborn concerning the correlation of color to sound or electromagnetic waves to sound waves. Their initial interest in pursuing this matter was simply to enhance their respective arts - Music for Mark and Painting for Michael, and to possibly publish an essay on their findings. In the course of attempting to prove their original hypothesis, they slowly began to discover new harmonic principles which were the result of the union of sound waves to light waves. Over the next five years they worked exclusively on this project following an harmonic blueprint wherever it would lead them, and in 2001 they compiled their research to date and self-published it in book form as The Unified Wave Theory. At that time they knew that there was no real chance of generating public demand for the material because it was such a paradigm shift of prevailing thought for harmonic theory. However, an amazing concept resulted out of this work. In order to correlate the properties of sound to light at all, new language identifiers and terminologies had to be developed to define the harmonic organization and in the end, a new language had been created.

This new harmonic language was recognized by them to be universally applicable and extremely useful to any field of study. They immediately filed for a patent on the language knowing full well what its potential could be. At this point they formed the MS Squared partnership to serve as a patent holding company and clearinghouse for their collective harmonic research. The next step was to determine the best way to pursue the application of this language.

It was readily apparent to them that a thousand years of evolution concerning Western music notation had achieved a system which was difficult to learn, harmonically constraining, and unable to effectively coordinate with the computer technologies of the modern era. They knew that music notation should be properly colorized for pitch, rhythm, and volume, but the question was how. What seemed like such a simple and obvious thing to do was anything but simple. The application of color to music had been attempted for hundreds of years by artists and scientists without success. Any applications which had made it to the market were used only as gimmicks to sell products and not to evolve the notation system.

This new avenue of pursuit forced them once again to do investigative research into the very idea of music notation as a language. What does it do and can it accurately define what occurs within a composition? In order to answer these questions they decided to scrap the existing music notation system altogether and design a new notation which could accurately define every possible concept within the harmonic language. In the course of this pursuit they once again began to discover new harmonic principles which began to make their earlier work more accessible to mainstream thought and open up a new frontier for music composition. They ultimately did create a seamless harmonic music notation system which they defined as the Universal Music System. With this system in place, Mark then began to experiment with it in his music art compositions. The results were astounding. He was essentially composing within a new genre of harmonic tonality, taking it into uncharted territory while still maintaining definable theoretical connections and achieving solid aural gratification. But how to develop this new system was yet another wall to climb.

Over the course of the next few years they began to develop instructional books and song books using the new Universal Music System. Mark began teaching this system in the Atlanta area and collectively they took their products to various trade shows receiving a modicum of success while showing ultimate viability for the system. However, they began to realize that as profound as the system was for compositional purposes, it would remain a daunting task to integrate it with the current Western notation for practicable educational concerns. Somehow they had to find a way to employ the current notation system with a different perspective in order to achieve a new outcome.

With no clear path in sight, the brothers began to work independently on their respective interests. Michael began to paint voraciously once again and also began to focus on writing texts on metaphysics relating to the research. In 2003 he formed his own publishing company as an outlet for his writing called Spectrum Muse. Mark, on the other hand, began to focus solely on his music composition and teaching research, and in 2004 achieved a watershed of musical creation. Through these compositions, and the fact that he was compelled to use existing Western notation software, Mark began to unravel the mechanisms necessary to implement the harmonic principles of the Universal Music System into the current Western notation. He then began work on what is now The Virtuoso Music Methodology Series. In 2005 he created Virtuoso Publishing to be the product manufacturer of all related material and in 2006 started the Virtuoso International School of Music in Asheville, North Carolina. The methodology has been a resounding success and is opening the doors to the brothers research and paving the way for a new era in music education.

Although still working independently on most projects, the brothers maintain collaboration on all theoretical matters and continue to create new theoretical material. Beginning in 2008 they rejoined efforts to start work on an advanced music theory curriculum to follow The Virtuoso Music Methodology Series.