Songs and Schemas

Henry Cowell: The Whole World of Music

2009-11-12T23:04:00.001-08:00

I finally had a chance to attend an Other Minds concert: the first of a two-concert series devoted to the American composer Henry Cowell. Other Minds is one of the Bay Area's great new music organizations, and for this concert they came down to the Peninsula. Henry Cowell was born and raised in Menlo Park, just a few miles from the Portola Valley concert venue.

The program covered chamber music from all eras of Cowell's career: from the famous early piano pieces like The Tides of Manaunaun from 1912, through wonderful 1930s chamber works (Toccanta and the String Quartet No. 4 "United"), on to some late songs from the 1950s (Thou Art the Tree of Life and Spring Pools).

Sarah Cahill performed a set of six of Cowell's solo piano pieces. This is Cowell's best-known repertoire, and I knew many of these pieces from recordings, but I never had heard them live. What a treat to hear them in concert: the sensuality of the sound and the intricacy of the performance comes across so much better in a live performance.

As a singer, the absolute highlight of the program for me was the set of eight Cowell songs, superbly sung by mezzo-soprano Wendy Hillhouse with Josephine Gandolfi on piano. The set covered 5 decades worth of songs in a beautifully arranged sequence. It was great to hear how Ms. Hillhouse went to the Library of Congress with an early version of Finale loaded onto her PowerBook to transcribe 50 of Cowell's 200+ songs from the manuscripts. She had been entranced by the music after singing some of the published songs at a Cabrillo Festival concert honoring Lou Harrison, but only a dozen or so of Cowell's songs have been published. Harrison put her in touch with Cowell's musical executor to access the unpublished songs during a year when she was singing with the opera in Washington, D.C.

The whole program was filled with great music in fine performances. Cowell fans in San Francisco can hear the second concert of the series on Friday at the Presidio Chapel. Thanks to Charles Amirkhanian and Other Minds for bringing Cowell's music back home to the Peninsula!

Back From Puccini Country

2009-10-14T22:50:00.000-07:00

A highlight of our recent vacation in Italy was the time we spent in Lucca and the surrounding area. Among its other charms, Lucca was the hometown of Giacomo Puccini, composer of several of the most popular operas of all time: La bohème, Madama Butterfly, Tosca, and many more.

The house where Puccini was born is a museum, but for now it is closed.

There is a nice statue nearby. Lucca also has a lot of signs still up from the sesquicentennial of Puccini's birth, letting you know of various sites important in Puccini's life.

Once Puccini had a couple of hits under his belt with Manon Lescaut and La bohème, he built a villa outside the city at Torre del Lago. He lived there until the last few years of his life. When a peat factory was built nearby, he moved to a newly built house a few miles away in Viareggio. The house in Torre del Lago is now a museum with a fine audio tour showing you through the rooms, the original furnishings, and plenty of Puccini memorabilia.

There's a sculpture near this house as well, complete with cigarette, though not very visible in this shot.

One of our favorite restaurants in Lucca, Gli Orte di Via Elisa, has a Puccini-themed room.

All of this has really put me in the mood to see West Bay Opera's upcoming production of La bohème. The cast is all new to me, save for Eric Coyne as Benoit/Alcindoro - we sang together in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights last year. The younger casts typical of West Bay productions, combined with the small house, really works to the advantage of this opera. The previous West Bay production had great chemistry! Check it out and hear why this is one of the top 5 most popular operas ever written.

Dolet 5 for Finale Now Available

2009-09-27T17:27:00.000-07:00

Dolet 5 for Finale, Recordare's plug-in for reading and writing MusicXML files from the Finale music notation program, is now available. Dolet 5 for Finale adds support for Finale 2010, including the new chord features, the new percussion features, and the Broadway Copyist font family.

Dolet 5 for Finale also offers improved support for importing MusicXML files created from Sibelius 6. Some of the new and improved features in this area are import of feathered beams, jazz articulations, text in glissando lines, German/Scandinavian font styles, text on blank pages, and optimized systems.

There are over 30 new features in Dolet 5 for Finale compared to the previous version 4.8. While there are many new features even for Finale 2010 users, the plug-in excels at bringing the most accurate MusicXML import and export to a wide range of Finale versions: Finale 2000 and later on Windows, Finale 2007 and later on Intel Macs, and Finale 2004 and later on Power PC Macs.

Dolet 5 for Finale comes with a 10-day free trial, so check it out and see how much better you can now transfer files between Finale and other music programs!

The Great Mahler 8

2009-09-06T23:59:00.001-07:00

After attending one of the San Francisco Symphony's performances of the Mahler 8 last year, I posted: "If the magic of these performances makes it onto disc, this could be a Mahler 8 recording for the ages."

Well, it did and it is. If you love Mahler you really want to get this recording. A piece as immense and physical as the Mahler 8 is particularly elusive to record. One problem is that if you get the impact of the extremes, you tend to flatten the details in the middle, or vice versa. I have heard several superb performances of large works that were being recorded for CD where somehow the recording lost an essential part of the performance magic. This disc meets the Mahler 8 challenge brilliantly.

The soloists are a dream team - the strongest group I have heard in this piece, sounding great both separately and together. They are topped off by the luxury casting of Laura Claycomb in the 2-line role of Mater gloriosa, way up in the stage right balcony. The chorus and orchestra sound exquisite. Part II in particular is amazing. In other performances it can be discursive and lose my interest at times. In this performance everything maintains a core energy and direction, and the time just flies by despite its length. This aspect of the performance really struck me both in the concert hall and in listening to the CD at home. Michael Tilson Thomas is extraordinary here.

The Adagio from Mahler's 10th that starts the recording is another amazing performance. I wish I had been at one of the concerts where they recorded that, but you can't hear them all.

Full disclosure: I have joined the Symphony Chorus for the 2009-2010 season, including a Mahler 2 with two of the same soloists. But last season I was just an audience member with some friends in the chorus.

Cabrillo 2009 Wrapup

2009-09-06T22:49:00.000-07:00

When I started this blog, I was concerned that between work and gigs, I might not be able to update this as often as I would like. That was true enough - work has been very busy this past month. So here is a delayed version of my impressions of the 2009 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz.

The two opening concerts of the first weekend were outstanding. I have heard lots of great pieces and performances at Cabrillo over the years, but the performance of Osvaldo Golijov's Azul on Friday, August 7 was an all-time highlight. I had heard Golijov's Ayre when Dawn Upshaw and company performed it as Stanford a while back. I liked it, but it didn't knock me out. This revised version of Azul knocked me out.

Alisa Weilerstein was a phenomenal cello soloist - one of those players where the sound-to-soul connection seems particular direct. Besides the orchestra, she was accompanied by a halo of concerto grosso-like soloists - Cyro Baptista and Jamey Haddad on percussion, and Michael Ward-Bergeman on hyper-accordion. The four soloists really shone as a quartet in the Transit movement, a cadenza that kicks the already-high energy level of the piece into yet another gear. I will definitely be searching out Weilerstein for future performances.

Golijov made some interesting introductory comments about how a lot of classical music has horse-driven rhythms, and a lot of minimalist and other more populist 20th/21st-century music has motorcycle-driven rhythms. In contrast, his own piece has bird-based rhythms. If you're thinking Messiaen, not quite - the rhythms invoked are those of wings and flight rather than birdsong. It was the type of insight into a composer's thought process that I wish was shared more frequently and candidly in either program notes or pre-performance talks.

Australian composer Brett Dean had two pieces performed at Cabrillo on opening weekend, and it was great to be introduced to such a fine composing talent. Moments of Bliss was the concluding work on Saturday's program, an orchestral suite that was written as part of the process of composing the opera Bliss. The opera was completed just a few weeks before Cabrillo and will be premiered in Sydney next year. The orchestral suite was a compelling listen in its own right. But since none of this is vocal music transcribed for orchestra (unlike, for example, the Doctor Atomic Symphony by John Adams), it does not give much insight into what type of opera this will be. Amphitheatre, a shorter work by Dean, made for a serious curtain-raiser on opening night. Both pieces were full of imagination, personality, and prominent contrabass clarinet parts. I look forward to hearing more of Dean's music in the future.

Another Australian composer, Matthew Hindson, had the interesting task of providing the curtain-raiser for the Grateful Dead Symphony on Sunday. Rave-Elation (Schindowski Mix) brings the time-honored tradition of classical music adapting popular dance music into the techno era. (Or so the composer claims: the dance influence is self-evident, but I am no expert on techno music.) It was a fun piece which whetted my appetite to hear more of Hindson's music. A good place to start is his Violin Concerto, recorded by Lara St. John and coupled with works by Corigliano and Liszt. Matthew has been a long-time Recordare customer and supporter of the MusicXML format, so it was great to be able to finally meet him and hear his music live at the festival.

The other pieces the first weekend were enjoyable as well. David Heath's Rise from the Dark is one of those pieces whose secrets are unraveled gradually over the course of the work. It made me want to hear the piece again once it's done so I could hear it in the context of what comes afterwards as well as what comes before. Alas, there's no chance of that for a piece this long, and this was its world premiere. Hopefully it makes its way further into the world and onto a recording. Avner Dorman's Spices, Perfumes, Toxins! was a double-percussion concerto featuring wonderful playing by the orchestra's own Steve Hearn and Galen Lemmon. Enrico Chapela's ínguesu made for a fun curtain-raiser on Saturday. Lee Johnson's Dead Symphony No. 6 was aimed at a different demographic than me, so I hesitate to judge it. I must confess though that I preferred hearing Elvis Costello and the Sugarcanes break out a suprising rendition of the Dead's "Friend of the Devil" at the Mountain Winery a week later.

The Saturday concert on the second weekend did not quite maintain the first weekend's level of exhilaration. The concert concluded strongly with Magnus Lindberg's Seht die Sonne, a rare chance to hear a second performance of a new piece so soon after the first, which we heard at the San Francisco Symphony last year. The Symphony's co-commissioning of the piece with the Berlin Philharmonic was oddly omitted from the Cabrillo program notes. The opening James MacMillan work, three interludes from his opera The Sacrifice, made for an interesting beginning. But in between those works was a disappointing trumpet concerto by Joby Talbot. You know you are in trouble when the most interesting music in a trumpet concerto is an oboe melody.

Overall, the programming of this year's festival was wondrous. Marin Alsop and the Festival Orchestra sounded better than ever together. I look forward to hearing what they come up with next summer!

How to Convert Sibelius Files to Finale Files

2009-07-30T19:22:00.000-07:00

With Recordare's release of the Dolet 5 for Sibelius plug-in, we have updated our video on "How to Convert Sibelius Files to Finale Files" to use Sibelius 6, Dolet 5 for Sibelius, and Finale 2010. The video compares the results of transferring files from Sibelius to Finale using Standard MIDI files - your only choice out of the box in Sibelius 6 - and using MusicXML files created by Dolet 5 for Sibelius. You can see also watch a higher-definition version on our site. Here's the version on YouTube:

Dolet 5 for Sibelius Now Available

2009-07-21T09:29:00.000-07:00

Dolet 5 for Sibelius, Recordare's plug-in for converting Sibelius files into MusicXML files, is now available. While it has over 30 improvements for Sibelius 5 users - including running about 20% faster - the big news is for Sibelius 6 users. Sibelius 6 added many new features to the ManuScript language, allowing us to export more of a Sibelius score than was possible in earlier versions.

The star feature of this release is exporting transpositions. This has been our most requested Dolet for Sibelius feature for years now. The Sibelius 5 point releases added more of the plug-in features needed to export transpositions, but not quite everything. Sibelius 6 filled in the missing pieces, so we are happy to now be able to export transposed scores at written pitch rather than concert pitch.

This is especially important for people converting band and orchestra scores from Sibelius to Finale and other programs. But it also helps choral and vocal music, as the octave-transposing treble clef used by tenors is now exported with full musical accuracy. As a tenor I'm especially happy to see this working. Octave-transposing clefs even work for Sibelius 5 users when they appear at the start of the score.

Beyond transpositions, some of the other new Dolet 5 features for Sibelius 6 users are:

Hidden staves on systems
System and page breaks are exported even without the layout being locked first
Fermatas over bar rests
Color of notes and other bar objects
Buzz roll "z" that appears on a stem
MusicXML encoding date
Jazz articulations
Comments.
Feathered beams
Note-attached arpeggios
Greater accuracy in exporting Sibelius 6 chord symbols
Export of chord symbols in German, Solfege, and Scandinavian styles

New Dolet 5 for Sibelius licenses for Windows and Mac are available for US $199.95. Upgrades from Dolet 4 for Sibelius are available for $129.95. It is available now from the Recordare Online Store.

Coming Up: The Marriage of Figaro

2009-07-21T08:58:00.001-07:00

If you are in the East Bay this weekend, here's the best music deal of the year. Come to see Open Opera's free performances of Mozart's masterpiece Le nozze di Figaro at the John Hinkel Park amphitheater in Berkeley. Performances are Saturday, July 25 and Sunday, July 26 and 3:00 pm.

The cast is wonderful, including Julian Arsenault as Figaro, Aimée Puentes as Susanna, Nicolai Janitsky as Count Almaviva, Adrien Roberts as the Countess, and Elizabeth Baker as Cherubino. The production is directed by Olivia Stapp and conducted by Jonathan Khuner. I will be singing and dancing in the chorus. And yes, there will be an orchestra and supertitles.

Come enjoy Mozart's funny, poignant, and beautiful masterwork in a lovely park setting. The amphitheater is right off the end of Somerset Place in Berkeley. And did I mention it was free?

Dolet Plug-in Updates for Sibelius and Finale

2009-06-29T18:05:00.000-07:00

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.

Michael Jackson: 1958 - 2009

2009-06-25T23:51:00.000-07:00

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.

Coming Up: Madama Butterfly

2009-05-09T22:10:00.001-07:00

There 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 (越後獅子), 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.

Musikmesse 2009 in Frankfurt

2009-04-18T22:13:00.001-07:00

Musikmesse 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:

When 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:

I 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.

There 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.

Despite 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:

And of course, there were the Frankfurter sausages:

Liskov Wins Turing

2009-03-24T15:41:00.000-07:00

Prof. 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!

Dolet 4.7 for Finale Now Available

2009-03-24T15:02:00.001-07:00

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.

EMI Digital Shakeup

2009-03-24T10:53:00.001-07:00

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?

Coming Up: Palo Alto Chamber Chorus

2009-03-05T21:07:00.001-08:00

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!

Force Quit and Move to Trash

2009-03-05T20:40:00.001-08:00

Well, this is a natural topic for this blog! First of all, U2's new album No Line on the Horizon is very good indeed. U2 albums take time to reveal the full depth of their charms, and I'm only on the second listening. But "Moment of Surrender" in particular is immediately enchanting, and it's a good sign that most every song sounds better on second hearing than first.

What make this album irresistible for a blog about music and software are the Mac OS GUI shout-outs in the song "Unknown Caller." Force quit and move to trash indeed. Computer applications like e-mail and web browsing have made it into pop song lyrics for quite a while now. One of my favorites is from Joe Jackson: "He says that she's jealous just like a female / She says I caught you, I went through your e-mail." But what other rock stars have put GUI command names in their songs? If you know, please comment here!

February Performances

2009-02-19T21:41:00.000-08:00

My next concert performances are coming up next week. I will be singing in the Stanford Symphonic Chorus in Stanford's annual Pan-Asian Music Festival, performing together with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra.

We will be singing Cosmic Solitude by Japanese composer Joji Yuasa (pictured here), along with Zoltán Kodály's Missa Brevis. Stephen Sano will conduct the choral portion of the concert.

The first half of the program features Tan Dun's Concerto for Water Percussion with soloist Haruka Fujii. This will be conducted by Jindong Cai. I'm looking forward to hearing this piece and learning what water percussion can sound like!

Performances are Friday, February 27 and Saturday, February 28 at 8:00 pm at Stanford Memorial Church. Tickets are available at the Stanford Ticket Office.

Meanwhile, JoAnn will be starting her two-week run of Orfeo ed Eurydice at West Bay Opera on Friday night. Performances are at 8:00 pm on February 20 and 28 and at 2:00 pm on February 22 and March 1. JoAnn will also be singing in the Stanford concert on the 27th.

Altova Case Study

2009-01-20T12:58:00.000-08:00

Recordare has been using Altova products such as XMLSpy and DiffDog for many years to help develop both the MusicXML format and our Dolet plug-ins. Now Altova has written up our experience as a case study and posted it on their blog at:

Altova Blog: Altova customer Recordare builds MusicXML-based solution

Alexander Falk, Altova's founder and CEO, has also linked to the case study from his blog:

XML Aficionado: MusicXML is music to my ears

Dolet 4.6 for Finale Now Available

2009-01-09T22:15:00.000-08:00

I hope that everyone had a happy holiday season and new year! To start off the new year, Recordare has released version 4.6 of our Dolet for Finale plug-in. Dolet is a plug-in for the Finale music notation program that reads and writes MusicXML files. Finale 2009 does this too, but Dolet offers batch translations, better interchange with Sibelius, optional validation against the new MusicXML XSD, more control over formatting during import, and more frequent maintenance updates. It also works with versions of Finale going back to 2000 on Windows, 2004 on Mac OS X Power PC, and 2007 on Mac OS X Intel.

Version 4.6 is a free maintenance update for existing Dolet 4 for Finale users. It improves the export of articulation and expression positioning, especially when using Finale 2009b, and fixes various bugs in both import and export.

Dolet 4 for Finale is available for a 30-day free trial and purchase from:

http://store.recordare.com/dolet4fin.html

Full details on what is new in 4.6 is in the version history at:

http://www.recordare.com/finale/v4versions.html

Richard Thompson at Villa Montalvo

2008-12-16T10:51:00.000-08:00

I just spent a very happy musical weekend at Villa Montalvo. Richard Thompson came to town for a 3-night engagement. Friday and Saturday nights were all-request shows, and Sunday night was a theme show on "Worksongs, Ballads and Rallying Cries: Contemporary and historical songs about the working man and woman, social injustice, and political unrest."

Richard Thompson is always a riveting performer, either as a soloist or with his band. He is a brilliant songwriter, a wonderfully expressive singer, and an amazing guitarist. Each of these shows highlighted his talents as both a performing songwriter and as a musical interpreter.

At the all-request shows, the audience submitted requests on slips of paper that Richard pulled out of a bucket during the show. He drew several at a time to pace things, avoiding problems like multiple ballads in a row. An assistant was in the stage right wings to grab lyrics off of Richard's web site or other net sites as needed. Some requests were skipped if he didn't remember the music or didn't want to do the song. The editing came in handy with the back-to-back shows, where only 4 songs were duplicated, including classics like 1952 Vincent Black Lightning and Dimming of the Day.

Some Friday highlights included performances of A Blind Step Away from Live, Love, Larf & Loaf, plus the unreleased songs The Hots For The Smarts and I Agree With Pat Metheny. My request, Guns Are The Tongues, also got played, as did a couple of Jimi Hendrix songs! This night was a great introductory show as it had a lot of the most popular songs, opening with 1952 Vincent Black Lightning and Beeswing back to back, and closing with Shoot Out The Lights.

Saturday's show had a larger percentage of less-obvious requests, including covers like Blue Christmas, Someone To Watch Over Me, and Substitute, along with less frequently played Thompson treasures like God Loves A Drunk. The show closed with a blistering rendition of Dad's Gonna Kill Me.

That song made a great segue into Sunday night's program of topical songs through the years. As I expected, songs from Richard and Danny Thompson's Industry album played a large role. When else are we going to hear four songs from that album in one show? These included Lotteryland, Last Shift, Big Chimney, and Sweetheart's On The Barricade.

Several earlier English songs were also included, including Cutty Wren, sung on the tune that I know as Green Bushes. There were lots of interesting covers, including songs by Merle Haggard (Working Man's Blues) Green Day (Minority), Phil Ochs (I Ain't Marching Anymore), Bob Marley (Get Up, Stand Up), Eric von Schmidt (Joshua Gone Barbados), Edwin Starr (War), and closing with a ferocious version of Midnight Oil's Beds Are Burning. George Galt added soulful harmonica to several of the songs on Sunday, as well as to some of the encore numbers on Saturday night.

This was my first time at Montalvo's Carriage House Theatre, but it won't be the last! It's a great place to see a show: a 300-seat theater with comfortable seating and excellent sound. I was in rows B, G, and N on the three nights, and the sound from rows G and N the last two nights was about as perfect as it gets. I get jealous of my friend Tom Spine's frequent reviews of shows at his local Tupelo Music Hall (just checked - they have both Vance Gilbert and Don White coming up in a couple of weeks). We don't have any place near us like that in terms of frequent bookings, but the Carriage House sure is a great place for the gigs they do book.

Photo by Anthony Pepitone via Wikimedia Commons.

Don Ellis's "Soaring" now on CD!

2008-12-01T23:21:00.000-08:00

Finally! My favorite studio album from Don Ellis, Soaring, is now available on CD from Amazon and other fine retailers. From hot charts like "Whiplash" and "Invincible" to beautiful ballads like "Nicole" and "Image of Maria", this album is the vital studio link between Tears of Joy and Live at Montreux. Composition, arranging, and playing are all first-rate on this album. I just ordered my copies (including gifts) so I have not heard how this CD sounds, but the Verve group usually does a great job on their reissues.

This leaves just one Don Ellis LP, Haiku, that has never made it to CD. The release of Haiku on CD is likely dependent on Soaring selling well, as both albums were released on MPS and are now controlled by Universal. If you're a Don Ellis fan or know a Don Ellis fan, please help make this a happy holiday season with one of his finest recordings ever.

Once again, thanks go to Nick DiScala for his amazing work in bringing Ellis's music back to life for the digital age. Nick has worked with the Ellis estate for years and contributed the liner notes for this release. For the longest time, only one of Don's big band albums was available on CD, together with some early small group albums. Now all the big band albums have made it to CD, and we just have the Don with strings album left to go. What an amazing turnaround! Nick is also one of the masterminds behind the Don Ellis Critical Editions, helping to make more of Don's music available to performers in the most authoritative versions possible.

Prof. Michael Hammer

2008-11-27T11:00:00.001-08:00

Michael Hammer was far and away my most influential computer science professor at MIT. And I had a lot of great professors there, both inside and outside of computer science. His far-too-early death last September shocked me. Most of the obituaries and tributes naturally focus on his groundbreaking work in business process reengineering. But I knew him as a computer science professor at MIT.

Prof. Hammer taught the best computer science class I ever had: MIT 6.035, Computer Language Engineering. Big deal, you say: the compiler class has long been one of the favorite courses among computer science undergraduates. The real attraction of the course, though, was how it explicitly worked on two levels: teaching both the subject matter of computer languages and compilers, but also how to think about solving computer science problems, particularly regarding software.

"The purpose of this class is to make you smart," he announced on the first day. And that he did. The problem sets were the most difficult ever, but difficult in all the right ways - to teach you how to think successfully about computer software problems you would likely see throughout your work life in software design and development. At the end of the course, discussing some topic in very high level languages, he remarked that "To be smart is a lot of work." Indeed it was, but the payoff was worth it.

The subject matter of the course also opened my thinking to concepts that shaped my career. The key idea was how any interaction with a computer could be considered a computer language. This eventually led to my moving into user interface research during graduate school, and then to the design and development of MusicXML when I returned to the music language software of my undergraduate days.

MIT in the late 70s and early 80s was a great place for computer science, music, and (thanks to Prof. Barry Vercoe's Experimental Music Studio) the combination of computers and music. But like most institutions outside Xerox PARC, little attention was being paid systematically to making computers more usable for people. This seemed like a great topic for research. Since Prof. Hammer was my best undergraduate CS professor and the one who showed me the connections between language design and user interface, I asked to join his research group. He agreed and I had a research assistantship in his group for my entire M.S. work, supported in part by Exxon Enterprises Inc.

This was the Office Automation Group at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. It had two main research projects: process-oriented research on an office analysis methodology, and technology-oriented research on an integrated office workstation. I worked on this second project, co-developing and then evaluating the usability of the first software for this workstation - the Etude integrated editor and formatter (influenced by Bravo and Scribe, later influencing Interleaf).

Our group co-authored two papers on Etude with Prof. Hammer as principal author, including Etude: An Integrated Document Processing System. Prof. Hammer also supported my attendance at one of the first major user interface conferences in the USA: the 1981 SIGSOC conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I didn't appreciate at the time how rare it was for graduate students to go to a conference where they were not presenting. I also got to travel to an ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOA conference on text editing in Portland, Oregon, where I presented a paper on Etude and the Folklore of User Interface Design. My best memory of that conference was getting to sit next to Doug Englebart at the conference banquet!

The MIT program for an M.S. in computer science emphasized (and perhaps still emphasizes) the thesis over coursework. Back in 1980 it was possible for a graduate student to read the entire English-language literature on human-computer interaction, and that is what I did during my studies there. My thesis was an experimental ease-of-use evaluation of the Etude system: an early attempt to get beyond folklore to more quantitative engineering for usability. I presented a talk on it at the first CHI conference at Gaithersburg, Maryland in 1982.

As you might predict from his future career, Prof. Hammer was more directly involved in the group's process research than the technology research, but he was always there for advice and support. One of his biggest contributions was keeping me focused on engineering research rather than science research - computer science was in the School of Engineering at MIT, not the School of Science. This was another invaluable lesson for my later work: it is the relentlessly practical nature of the MusicXML language that has contributed in large part to its success.

I went to work for DEC after getting my M.S. at MIT and lost touch with Prof. Hammer. I did enjoy the acclaim that Reengineering the Corporation achieved, knowing of its roots in the group's early research at MIT. Once I moved to SAP, of course, reengineering became a hugely important topic in my work. So I was delighted to talk with Michael backstage at one of SAP's SAPPHIRE user conferences. He was going to be giving a keynote address, while I was going to give a business intelligence UI demo during Hasso Plattner's keynote. Soon afterwards I moved back to music software, and our paths diverged again.

So by all means, acclaim Michael Hammer for his revolutionary work on business processes and reengineering. It is fitting that this is how he will be best remembered professionally. But please realize that before he became a bestselling author, a company founder, and a business guru, he was an amazing and inspirational computer science professor. Today I give thanks for the great influence he has had on my professional life.

October / November Performances

2008-11-25T21:19:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since posting because things have been very busy with both MusicXML work and performances. I can't write about the MusicXML work at this point, but the performances went great.

Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights got a fine reception at City College of San Francisco. David Ahlstrom's widow Doris Ahlstrom attended most of the performances and sent the cast a great thank you note afterwards. Many of Mr. Ahlstrom's colleagues attended and delighted in finally seeing this opera up in a fully staged and orchestrated production.

These photos were taken at the dress rehearsal. From left to right above are Marguerite (Sarita Cannon), Doctor Faustus (John Warner), and Mephistopheles (me). Below is a scene from the Finale, which adds Man From Over the Seas (Eric Coyne), Old Woman With a Sickle (Elizabeth Finkler), Boy (Kelly Ann Lawson), Dog (Denee Deckert), and members of the ensemble behind the scrims:

JoAnn's performances of Carmen at West Bay Opera also went very well, with the entire run selling out. When the curtain opened, there was JoAnn center stage as a beggar lady, sitting and talking to the bugs on the ground. This was another typically excellent West Bay performance, full of passion and great singing in a nice small theater where you are not so physically distanced from the happenings on stage.

Last weekend, the Stanford Symphonic Chorus and Peninsula Symphony contributed to the Bernstein 90th birthday festivities with a performance of Chichester Psalms. The program also included the premiere of Brian Holmes's Amherst Requiem, which mixes Emily Dickinson texts sung by the soprano soloist with the Latin text sung by the adult and children's choruses. Heidi Melton was a fabulous soloist and the Vivace Youth Chorus of San Jose did a fine job too.

The highlight of the month as an audience member was the San Francisco Symphony's performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 8 last Saturday. The San Francisco Symphony has established a wonderful level of excellence under Michael Tilson Thomas's direction, but this just may have been their best performance yet. I've heard the 8th several times before, but never like this. The singing of the chorus under Ragnar Bohlin has moved to a whole new level, while the eight soloists were at a uniform level of excellence that I have never heard in this work before, either live or on CD. This was recorded for the final release of the SFS Mahler symphony cycle on hybrid SACD. If the magic of these performances makes it onto disc, this could be a Mahler 8 recording for the ages.

Coming Up: Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights

2008-09-29T15:45:00.001-07:00

In two weeks, I will be singing Mephistopheles in the staged premiere of David Ahlstrom's opera Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, on a libretto by Gertrude Stein. This is a production of City College of San Francisco's Music and Theatre Arts departments. David Parr will direct and Michael Shahani will conduct.

This is a 50-minute opera in three acts that envisions Faust as Thomas Edison. Here, Faust has sold his soul to invent the electric light. Mephistopheles, the Prince of Darkness, is not happy with this turn of events, but finds that he has limited options available in this deal gone wrong. (This is a tenor devil, after all, not the traditional baritone or bass devil.) The second act includes a Very Grand Ballet of Lights. With this subject matter, this is an opera very appropriate for the San Francisco and Silicon Valley areas.

Richard Scheinin and others have written about lack of melody in contemporary opera. This opera does not fall into the all-too-common trap of having most of the vocal music written in a recitative style. Instead it is full of melodies, often quite upbeat and jaunty, so it is very possible you will leave humming at least one of the tunes.

Rounding out the program are songs from another Ahlstrom work, America, I love you on texts by e. e. cummings. Performances are Friday, October 10 and 17 at 8:00 pm; Saturday, October 11 and 18 at 8:00 pm, and Sunday, October 19 at 2:00 pm. All performances are at the Diego Rivera Theatre at Phelan and Judson at City College of San Francisco's Ocean campus. General admission tickets are $15, or $10 for students and seniors. Call (415) 239-3100 for reservations and more information.