Dolet Plug-in Updates for Sibelius and Finale

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Michael

Recordare has released new Dolet updates for Sibelius and Finale. Dolet 4.2 for Sibelius adds support for Sibelius 6 and includes bug fixes for double-note tremolos and cue-size noteheads. The Dolet 1.6 for Sibelius plug-in, intended for people using Sibelius 2.1 through Sibelius 4, also has added Sibelius 6 support.

Dolet 4.8 for Finale improves the installation on Windows Vista. It also has bug fixes for multilingual text blocks and positioning measure-attached items in the absence of beat chart spacing. However, this version does not yet support Finale 2010. Finale 2010 made major improvements in Finale’s support for chords, percussion notation, rehearsal marks, and graphics formats. The MusicXML support included in Finale 2010 handles all these changes, but Dolet 4.8 for Finale does not. Recordare is busy working on a new Dolet for Finale release that includes Finale 2010 support.

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Michael Jackson: 1958 – 2009

Posted on June 26, 2009 by Michael

Michael Jackson - Thriller album cover

Sadly, I’m afraid that Tim Rice may have gotten it right in some of the lyrics to Evita:

High flying, adored
What happens now?
Where do you go from here?
For someone on top of the world
The view’s not exactly clear
A shame you did it all at twenty six.
There are no mysteries now
Nothing can thrill you
No one fulfill you

RIP Michael. Thank you for the amazing music.

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Coming Up: Madama Butterfly

Posted on May 10, 2009 by Michael

West Bay Opera poster for Madama ButterflyThere is a reason why some operas are so beloved and so often performed. While there are many great operas in the world, in and out of the repertoire, some works go beyond with a transcendent synthesis of music and drama.

Puccini’s Madama Butterfly is one of those operas. But it is trickier than some of the other classics. The first time I saw a performance of Butterfly, the singing was excellent, but the acting was wooden and the direction perfunctory. Some operas can survive that treatment and still work their wonders, but not this one. The opera has a lot of emotional and musical territory to cover, but the events of the plot don’t do all the work. Without real commitment and both singing and acting skill, the show can flounder.

If you want to see and hear what great opera is about – whether you are looking for a conversion experience to opera, or are already a maven – come see West Bay Opera‘s production of Madama Butterfly. JoAnn and I are in the chorus – I’m the “old man” – but we’re only on stage for one scene. This opera lives and dies by its title character, and Baltimore’s Kenneithia Mitchell really delivers here. The rest of the cast are also wonderful actor/singers, including Mathew Edwardsen as a multi-layered Pinkerton, Kindra Scharich as Suzuki, and David Cox as Sharpless.

The production is led by a veritable West Bay Opera “dream team” including director David Ostwald and conductor Sara Jobin. Performances are May 22, 24, 30, and 31 at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto. Opera is really exciting to see in a small house like this one. At 400 seats, it’s almost an order of magnitude smaller than a place like the San Francisco Opera House. The difference is like seeing a rock group in a club vs. an arena show – the intimacy of the venue really can pay off.

The Friday and Saturday performances are at 8:00 pm and the Sunday performances are at 2:00 pm. Tickets are $20 to $55 and are available from the West Bay box office or online.

Madama Butterly even has a MusicXML connection. Puccini used several Japanese songs in the opera. One of them is Echigo-Jishi, which is the song we use on our MusicXML samples page so developers can test how their MusicXML programs handle Asian language text and lyrics. You can hear it in the orchestra at the beginning of the entrance of the geishas in Act I.

And for something completely different, next week JoAnn and I are performing Mozart’s Coronation Mass and Haydn’s Te Deum with the Stanford Symphonic Chorus. Moving back and forth between this classical program and Puccini’s lush romanticism has been a lot of fun! The concert is Friday, May 15 at Stanford’s Memorial Church, and tickets are available online from the Stanford Ticket Office.

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Musikmesse 2009 in Frankfurt

Posted on April 19, 2009 by Michael

Frankfurt Messeturm photoMusikmesse was held earlier this month in Frankfurt. This is the big European music instruments show, similar to NAMM in Anaheim for the USA. It has been three years since I last attended Musikmesse, so this was a great chance to catch up with customers, colleagues, business partners, and friends in Europe.

Hall 5 hosted the music software companies, including the music notation software products. Everyone was there: not just the USA and UK products like Finale, Sibelius, and Notion, but significant German and Swiss software like PriMus and MIDI-Connections. The capella software company was showing off their notation products, including the new capella-scan 7, in the quieter confines of Hall 3.

As you can see from the photos, we had gorgeous weather in Frankfurt this year. It was sunny and warm for the whole show; very similar weather to what I was missing in California that week, maybe even better. This is great at shows like Musikmesse and NAMM because it’s very difficult to talk in the loud show floors. When you can meet outside as well as inside to talk, it makes the fair much more pleasant.

As an example, here’s a photo that Thomas Bonte took of a meeting I had with people from the MuseScore and Wikifonia teams. From left to right that’s Benoit Catteau, Nicolas Froment, me, and Thomas Bonte:

MuseScore and MusicXML at Musikmesse photoWhen it comes to what is exhibited at the show, there are a couple of big differences between Musikmesse and NAMM, both of which are found in Hall 3. Most importantly for Recordare, Musikmesse draws many more classical music publishers. I got to meet with several of the more forward-thinking publishers to discuss some of the new MusicXML-based technologies we are working on related to digital sheet music.

The other big difference – and one that makes for a better photo – is the accordion selection. Aisles of accordion manufacturers, in big booths, with excellent performers:

Beltuna booth at Musikmesse 2009I completed my meetings by Saturday morning, so during the rest of the day I finally got the chance to see Frankfurt beyond the Messe, the Hauptbahnhof, and the airport. The Städel Museum was especially striking. Of particular interest to me were the beautiful paintings by several German artists, such as Hans Thoma, whose work I did not know before.

Städel Museum in FrankfurtThere was also a “Carvaggio in Holland” exhibit showing paintings by both Carvaggio and several Dutch painters (Hendrick Terbrugghen, Gerard van Honthorst, and Dirck van Baburen) who were very influenced by Carvaggio.

Carvaggio in Holland posterDespite the fact that the subject matter in this exhibit was largely paintings of musicians, there was no cross-promotion that I saw between the Städel and Musikmesse. As Amanda Ameer would point out, a missed opportunity, but still a fine exhibit.

After the museum, I relaxed along the river on this beautiful spring day:

By the river in FrankfurtAnd of course, there were the Frankfurter sausages:

Frankfurter photo

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Liskov Wins Turing

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Michael

Prof. Barbara LiskovProf. Barbara Liskov has won the Association for Computing Machinery’s Turing Award, often described as the Nobel Prize of computer science. This was great news to hear because Prof. Liskov was another of my very influential professors at MIT.

When I was an MIT sophomore, I took a prototype of the class that would eventually become 6.170, MIT’s Laboratory in Software Engineering. In this class, Prof. Liskov taught us about data abstraction, perhaps the most fundamental of the concepts that came to be known as object-oriented programming. She eventually designed a computer language, CLU, that directly supported data abstraction, and I programmed in CLU for my M.S. research work at MIT. But at this point, data abstraction was new and there were no languages to support it directly. So we learned how to approximate data abstraction using the traditional PL/1 language. This was a lesson that came in very handy in the years when programming needed to be done in older languages like C and Pascal. Eventually, languages like Java, C++, and Visual Basic came into widespread use with built-in support for data abstraction.

This was only my fourth programming class – I had one class in high school and two as an MIT freshman – and it had the biggest projects I had programmed to that time. So it was a tremendous boon to get the ideas of data abstraction into my software development repertoire at an early age.

Thanks, Prof. Liskov, for your great teaching in my undergraduate and graduate years at MIT. Enjoy your richly-deserved award!

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Dolet 4.7 for Finale Now Available

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Michael

Recordare has released version 4.7 of our Dolet for Finale plug-in. The big new feature in this release is support for reading and writing Open Score Format (OSF) files.

Open Score Format is a new format for distribution, interchange, and archiving of musical scores. Based on the MusicXML 2.0 format, it adds new features for structured metadata, digital signing, improved multimedia packages, and profiles for common content types. The latest 0.9.1 beta has also been published on the SourceForge site.

Open Score Format was initially developed by a consortium of organizations with interests in the digital music publishing industry, including Hal Leonard, MakeMusic, Music Sales, Recordare, and Yamaha.

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EMI Digital Shakeup

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Michael

It’s been interesting watching EMI’s digital efforts from afar. Here was a record label that actually hired people like Douglas Merrill and Cory Ondrejka with flashy Silicon Valley high-tech resumes and chartered them to start innovating in digital sales and marketing of music. Both Merrill and Ondrejka blogged about their hiring.

The immediate red flag that went up for me was that neither Merrill nor Ondrejka are musicians, nor did they have experience in music software or music representation technology. If all you want to do is build a basic music e-commerce site, that’s not a big problem. But if you want to innovate in digital music, it seems you are tying your hands behind your back without senior people who have deep experience with both technology and music.

I have not met either Mr. Merrill or Mr. Ondrejka. From their track records it seems safe to assume that they are very bright people. But domain experience really does help tremendously in application software development, and the more specialized your domain the more valuable this experience becomes. In Mr. Merrill’s blog post, you can see that he worried about this too.

Many musicians have a well-deserved distrust of software tech people – whether due to music business issues, or wondering why the music software they are using is driving them crazy. It certainly has helped Recordare and MusicXML to be able to point to my musical resume (singing in opera and symphony choruses, playing trumpet on orchestral CDs still in print today) as well as my professional technical resume. Nearly everybody developing software at companies like MakeMusic and the Sibelius unit at Avid can make similar claims, whatever genre of music they perform. The need may not seem so obvious for music sales and marketing software as for music notation software, but that might be a case of not knowing what you don’t know.

So now Mr. Merrill is leaving EMI after less than a year. From my corporate experience, this looks related to Guy Hands’s decreasing involvement at EMI, since the reports were that Hands hired Merrill for the job. Mr. Ondrejka has been promoted, though to a position that has a lower-level title than Mr. Merrill had. I’m still waiting to see a record label make a high-level technology hire of someone who is deeply experienced in music and software, separately and together. The payoff would be even better for a group like EMI that includes music publishing too. Perhaps this has already happened, but in a lower profile fashion?

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Coming Up: Palo Alto Chamber Chorus

Posted on March 6, 2009 by Michael

Most of my performing these days is usually in symphonic and opera choruses. I sang in two chamber choruses back in Boston, but have yet to find a good fit with a full-time chamber chorus locally.

So I am really enjoying our rehearsals with the 15 singers of the Palo Alto Chamber Chorus. Most of the group also sings (now or in the recent past) with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus or West Bay Opera. We’ll be singing Mozart’s Missa brevis in D, K. 194 with the Baroque Concerto Ensemble under James Frieman’s direction. The concert is Sunday, March 15 at 7:30 pm at the Palo Alto Art Center. The rest of the program includes music by Vivaldi and Elgar, directed by Joyce Malick. Admission is free!

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