Songs and Schemas

Manhattan Big Band Heaven

2009-12-05T23:23:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving week was a slice of contemporary big band heaven in Manhattan. On Wednesday night, Darcy James Argue's Secret Society performed two sets at Iridium. These photos are from the first set:

It's interesting how you can go your whole life without seeing a bucket-muted bass trombone, and then you can see it twice in three days. Here's the Secret Society version, with Jennifer Wharton on bass trombone:

Darcy gave interesting introductions to some of the tunes:

The second set was even better than the first, highlighted by a great performance of Ferromagnetic. But our seats didn't work as well for photos.

On Friday night, we saw the Maria Schneider Orchestra play their second set at the Jazz Standard. We heard the band when they played in San Francisco a few years ago, but it's so much better to hear them in a small club like this than in someplace like Herbst Theatre. The set included a new commissioned piece, tentatively called "The Bean Fields."

Maria was conducting in between a couple of the front tables, so we were really up close and personal, as you can see from this after-set photo:

Thanks so much to Darcy for mentioning the Kandinsky retrospective at the Guggenheim in his Secret Society newsletter. We went to see it on Friday and it was as wonderful as advertised. My introduction to Kandinsky's art was a bit different than most people's: one of his paintings provided the cover art for the MIT Symphony Orchestra's first LP on Turnabout. This LP was recorded my freshman year, so I'm playing third trumpet on both selections. Both the Piston and Copland recordings are still available on CD in different packagings.

The Guggenheim Museum looked as lovely as ever in the cloudy late November light:

Argue and Schneider write wonderfully well for big band, so it was a real thrill to hear them in clubs within a few days of each other. I'm looking forward to more great music from these bands and bandleaders in the future.

Dolet 5.1 Updates Now Available

2009-12-04T15:21:00.000-08:00

Recordare now has version 5.1 maintenance updates available for both the Dolet 5 for Finale and Dolet 5 for Sibelius plug-ins. The Dolet 5.1 for Finale update was just released today, and includes a dozen new features and fixes compared to version 5.0.

The Dolet 5.1 for Sibelius update was released back in October, but I missed blogging about it. It now supports Sibelius 6.1, which added ManuScript support for many new features, including document setup and selected engraving rules. So version 5.1 exports much more score formatting from Sibelius 6.1 than has been possible in the past. Sibelius 6.1 also runs plug-ins 2 or 3 times faster than previous Sibelius versions, and most Dolet users will really notice this difference.

These updates are free for current Dolet 5 customers. Both plug-ins are available at the Recordare Online Store, with upgrade discounts available for Dolet 4 users. These updates take another step forward in making digital sheet music interchange between different music programs as seamless and accurate as possible.

Reicha Requiem Reviewed

2009-11-24T20:33:00.000-08:00

It's unusual for amateur groups like the Stanford Symphonic Chorus and Peninsula Symphony get reviewed. But the rarity of the Reicha Requiem attracted a review from David Bratman in San Francisco Classical Voice.

It's a nice, insightful piece, and I love his thoroughly appropriate lead sentence: "Tired of the usual run of jolly Christmas choral music?" The Reicha is a severe, complex work It's quite beautiful, but not quite the more comforting kind of Requiem that Fauré and Brahms would later write. It's great to see the piece and performance attract some press attention.

Darcy James Argue's Secret Society - Infernal Machines

2009-11-23T15:29:00.001-08:00

Infernal Machines, the debut album from Darcy James Argue's Secret Society, is my favorite jazz album of the year. Here is a big band album that engages popular music in ways that have been largely lost since the 1970s, and does so with great beauty and sophistication.

Argue refers to the Secret Society as a steampunk big band. I hadn't heard of steampunk before this, but I see now how that's an apt analogy. Another shorthand description might be Maria Schneider meets Michael Gibbs. Neither of those capture the individual personality, of course, but you can hear that in the music - there are plenty of free downloads available at the Secret Society site.

One thing I find particularly refreshing about Argue's writing is its avoidance of the layered orchestration cliches common to most big band music. If you read the previous Herb Pomeroy post and want to hear what it sounds like when a big band composer really likes to rub color against color, this is the album for you! Argue studied with Bob Brookmeyer. While you can hear the influence in the approach to orchestration, I find Argue's music has a whole different aesthetic from Brookmeyer's.

In addition, Argue is a music copyist who has made some very helpful contributions to improving jazz support in our Dolet for Finale plug-in.

This coming Thanksgiving week in New York is a slice of big band heaven - Argue's Secret Society performs at Iridium on Wednesday, and the Maria Schneider Orchestra has a residency at the Jazz Standard throughout the week. Argue's band has never toured to California, and Schneider's only plays in big venues and festivals out here. So I'm looking forward to hearing these two bands in New York clubs later this week! Friends in the Boston area will have a chance to check out the band in a few months at the Regattabar on February 25.

Herb Pomeroy on Jazz Writing

2009-11-23T12:48:00.000-08:00

Herb Pomeroy directed jazz bands at MIT from 1963 to 1985. He was the founder of the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble, one of the first three collegiate bands from the USA to perform at the prestigious Montreux Jazz Festival. He was a fine trumpeter and a great bandleader, but his largest legacy may be as a teacher at the Berklee College of Music. His line writing class at Berklee was legendary, and he gave a short synopsis of some of the key points of writing and orchestration in the first of his Music at MIT Oral History interviews on December 14, 1999. This happened when Forrest Larson asked a great follow-up question about some of the musical values that Herb had learned when studying at Schillinger House:

Well this fellow, Richard Bobbitt, who was the dean, he had studied with Stefan Wolpe. I hope my memory is accurate. Bobbitt learned from studying with Wolpe about voicing not through choosing notes because they are the root, the 3rd, the 5th, the 7th, the 9th, but making most - I don't want to say all - most of the vertical structures structures that are created because of the intervallic relationship between the notes, not because they are a function... So, certain intervals - you know, there are consonances, there are dissonances. If we want to get richer, or we want to get darker, or we want to get brighter, the choice of interval between notes is more important than the function that the note is in the chord.
Which will also - I sort of based a whole course on this later on, when I started to teach - also will take away from the obviousness of the chords that have the root in the bass, from the chords that have the 3 - 7 tritone that announce "I am this chord" and there's very little you can do about it. Instead of taking the notes because they are these very important - vitally important in certain areas of sound. But if you're looking to broaden, whether you're a classical composer or a jazz composer - this approach to intervallic choice of notes rather than function choice of notes I got originally from Bobbitt... I learned a great deal from this man about this, the intervallic approach to vertical writing as opposed to the function.
Even then I was saying to myself, "This is going to be valuable." I tell you, so many students that I had at Berklee, and I don't mean to wave the flag here, have come back to me - two, five, ten years after, not while they're taking the course, after they've absorbed it - and said that this course was one of the most opening things that they studied in a school or classroom situation...
Most jazz ensembles - whether they be three or four horns and a rhythm section or a whole band - the instrumental sound is pretty similar. I don't mean the harmonic sound. I don't mean the style of the player's vibrato. The purely instrumental sound when you hear whether it's 4 horns in like an octet or you hear the 12, 13 horns of a full jazz orchestra - the instrumental sound, the layered effect of color of trumpets, color of trombones, color of saxes in this function kind of harmony that we're talking about - is the same. Whether you listen to Basie of '35, or you listen to Woody of '54, or you kind of listen to Mel and Thad of '85 - whichever of these bands. Nothing to do with rhythmic style, harmonic style, era - was it swing, was it bebop, was it whatever. This layered, as I call the layer-lit colors, each layer really separated from each other, not entwined like this getting a richer sound instrumentally, is the same.
Whereas if you use this non-function, this intervallic work, and put the instruments together so you rub color against color - put a reed between two brass, rather than put four brass and then four trombones and then five saxes, or maybe one or two overlapping - but I can hear a typical big band and it almost sounds like there are just the three primary colors, so to speak. I don't hear any sense of rainbow effect going on there. So these are some of the things that I learned from these teachers which were not jazz tools, but they were music tools.
I knew then, and in hindsight I even thanked them even more. Because so many students - I mean, I've had many people who are professional writers in their home lands, directors of radio / TV studio bands, conductors of symphony groups who wanted to get into the jazz thing, leaders of big bands all over Europe, who came and studied at Berklee and would take this course. And I could watch, I could see in their faces while I was saying these things, I could see these looks, this opening. That was very gratifying, to know that you had...
I did not invent this, I merely organized the thinking. People say "oh, you created it." No! Maybe that mathematical mind from back in my teens and all that allowed me to organize. When you teach as long as I did, and stand in front of the thousands and thousands, literally, hours I have stood in front of bands and rehearsed them, and developed an eye-ear relationship. I do not have a God-given eye-ear relationship; I have a developed eye-ear - see the score and hear it in my head. The number of hours that I was able to do that - and I feel very blessed with my own professional band, with the Berklee band, and with the MIT band, and then clinics all around the country and the world and all that - I don't think it's exaggerating to say it's thousands of hours that I've stood there and heard it and seen it. It's allowed me to perceive things about scoring techniques for jazz orchestras that I don't think many people have had the opportunity to know.
The only person that I've been able to have a close association with who - we've talked about it some, but I just knew it from observing him - was Bob Brookmeyer. I think Brook has this same sort of ability, and he's a marvelous writer.
I don't know what kind of thoughts and things Gil Evans had in his head. I don't know about Duke - I tried to find out from Duke, I played with the band and would question him. (Laughing) He'd be terrible - I'd say, if we were in a room and it was casual, I'd say "Duke, come here - on this tune, in the first two measures you do this", and I'd play on the piano, "but I can't figure out what you do in the next two measures." And he'd say, "Oh, you're doing it better than I could do it anyway" and just walk away. He wouldn't show me anything!

Please note that I transcribed this interview excerpt. Any errors are mine, not the MIT Lewis Music Library's. The library is working on officially transcribing the interviews. Hopefully the first transcripts will be available sometime next year.

Music at MIT Oral History Project

2009-11-23T11:42:00.000-08:00

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the remarkable Music at MIT Oral History Project at the MIT Lewis Music Library. For 10 years, Forrest Larson has been interviewing key players in the history of music at MIT. His interviews are meticulously prepared and conducted, so he elicits many wonderful revelations about music at MIT, the lives and careers of MIT musicians, and remarkable observations about many aspects of music making for both amateurs and professionals.

Music has been at MIT for most of the Institute's existence, with a formal music program established in 1947. The Oral History Project includes interviews that cover music at MIT from the 1940s onward, including perspectives from faculty, staff, former students, and visiting artists.

I've listened to the interview with three musicians who were very important to me during my MIT student years: John Corley, conductor of the MIT Concert Band; Herb Pomeroy, conductor of the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble; and John Bavicchi, former MIT student and de-facto composer-in-residence for the MIT Concert Band during the last 30 years of John Corley's tenure. With the permission of the Lewis Music Library, I will be excerpting and discussing some of the material from these interviews that I find especially relevant to music making today. I hope you enjoy these posts!

Reicha Requiem at Stanford

2009-11-18T22:27:00.001-08:00

Interested in hearing a rarely-performed large-scale choral work from the early 19th century? Here's your chance to hear Anton Reicha's Missa pro defunctis (Requiem). The Stanford Symphonic Chorus and Peninsula Symphony will be performing it this weekend, together with excerpts from Bach's Christmas Oratorio. Performances are Friday, November 20 at 8:00 pm and Sunday, November 22 at 1:30 pm in Stanford Memorial Church. Stephen Sano will conduct the Reicha, and Mitchell Sardou Klein will conduct the Bach. Soloists include the fabulous Wendy Hillhouse, who we heard singing Henry Cowell last week. Tickets are available online or at the door.

This will be the premiere of a new performing edition of the Reicha prepared by Dr. Amy Goodman Weller for her Stanford Ph.D. dissertation. Reicha was a contemporary and friend of Beethoven. He is best known today for his wind quintets and his teaching of composers including Liszt and Berlioz. Reicha was a counterpoint professor, and this work is loaded with fugues. It concludes with a fabulous double fugue on "Cum sanctis" that Reicha used as an example of choral fugal writing in his Traité de haute composition musicale. That fugue is my favorite part of the work, with a highly syncopated Lacrimosa close behind. I'll be singing in the tenor section, up front and center in the chorus.

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.