[Dixielandjazz] The New Fake Book?

[Stephen Barbone]

An interesting article for band leaders who use sheet music, fake books,
etc. "What a Wonderful World" we now live in with all these electronic
advantages. Sheik . . . better jump on this format with your works. :-)
VBG.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


May 20, 2004 - NY Times - By ADAM BAER

At the Ready, Sheet Music Minus the Sheets


        Ike Garson can finally travel light.

        A pianist and composer who has played in David Bowie's band
since 1972, he fretted for decades over his ever expanding collection of
sheet music, stored in dozens of heavy manila folders overflowing with
heavily annotated sheets, many of them torn. But on one recent weekday
morning, while fighting Los Angeles traffic on his way to an early
"Tonight'' show rehearsal, he actually had clean copies of nearly all of
his hundreds of works in his car with him - in a thin, lightweight box
about the size of a conductor's score.

Mr. Garson was carrying his music in digital form, scanned into his
MusicPad Pro Plus, a five-pound tablet computer made by a company called
Freehand Systems. The $1,200 device, with a 12-inch liquid crystal
display touchscreen, is the first of a class of computers that enable
musicians to store music and edit it onscreen. Soon it will also allow
them to communicate with one another over wireless networks.

In much the way that portable digital audio players have changed the way
people consume tunes, tablets like the MusicPad are changing the way
musicians use sheet music, which is so compact that it can be digitally
stockpiled far more cost-effectively than MP3 audio files.

"It's something I always wanted, and was trying to work out with a
computer,'' said Mr. Garson, 58, who has volunteered suggestions to
Freehand Systems on how to improve the MusicPad. "But it became so
unwieldy.''

Kurt Bester, 48, a pianist and composer who also tested the device, said
it had freed him from fumbling with paper when he plays since he can
turn the page by tapping the screen or pressing a foot pedal. The bright
screen helps him read music in dark rooms, take notes and even archive
music he writes before it has been printed.

"This is my sheet-music iPod," he said.

Beyond its usefulness for professional musicians, the MusicPad could
help restore sheet music's luster as a tool for amateur entertainment as
Freehand Systems seeks to expand the amount of sheet music available
online. Through the company's newly purchased Web music store,
sunhawk.com, MusicPad users can download and edit 35,000 newly digitized
scores.

An average-size music store today carries sheet music for about 2,000
individual works, according to Fred Anton, chief executive of Warner
Brothers Publications, and customers generally must order others through
the mail unless they live in a metropolitan area with a
professional-level sheet-music store. Freehand Systems hopes to use
Sunhawk to change that.

It already offers about 20,000 works from the complete 40,000-work
Warner Brothers Publications catalog at the Web site (the rest will make
it online in a couple of months). And it is working on similar
arrangements with other top publishers that could double the amount of
music available through Sunhawk. (Of the two other leading online
sheet-music stores, musicnotes.com provides nearly 20,000 individual
works and Hal Leonard's sheetmusicdirect.com, over 10,000.)

Sunhawk customers can preview songs, transpose them into different keys
and hear them in MIDI format. The sheet-music files are encrypted to
limit the transfer of a work to the number of MusicPads for which it was
purchased; encryption also allows Sunhawk to rent instrumental parts of
a composition for limited periods.

Mr. Anton said that the MusicPad and Sunhawk could help resolve two
problems that have crippled sales of sheet music online: the limited
portability of paper and the fact that the official versions of many
pieces are sold only by the publishers.

Mr. Anton dismissed worries about the potential for trading illegal
copies of music sold online.

"The Xerox machine has always been the arch enemy of the printed music
world, and copying is impossible to police," he said.

Not unexpectedly, Freehand Systems faces competition in the race to take
the slow-growing sheet-music industry digital. David Sitrick, a patent
attorney and engineer in Chicago, has developed a system called the
eStand, which involves proprietary software installed on pairs of
Wi-Fi-enabled touchscreen tablet computers. Mr. Sitrick received patents
for the concepts behind the eStand in 1998 and 2000, two years before
Freehand Systems patented the "music annotation system for performance
and composition of musical scores" that led to the MusicPad.

In fact, Mr. Sitrick, 53, has sued Freehand Systems for patent
infringement. He has also filed an "interference proceeding" against the
musician Harry Connick Jr. over a patent he received two years ago for
"a system and method for coordinating music display among players in an
orchestra." Mr. Connick, whose system is said to provide for digital
conversion of handwriting into musical notation and to distribute
electronic scores over a network, declined to comment.

Kim Lorz, the chief executive of Freehand Systems, said his company had
not infringed on Mr. Sitrick's patents, although Freehand Systems does
plan to release a double-screen model for conductors.

This fall Mr. Sitrick expects to begin selling the eStand, which he says
will have more memory and more computing power than the MusicPad - which
has 64 megabytes of RAM and 96 megabytes of flash memory, enough for
roughly 5,000 pages of sheet music - and will cost considerably more. He
also plans to introduce a digital-sheet-music Web site, he said, and is
considering selling his music-reading and editing software separately.

Mr. Sitrick has shown the eStand, which mimics the look and feel of an
open score, mainly to professional musicians, and he has already won
over some prominent artists, including the violinist Itzhak Perlman.

Two years ago Mr. Perlman tested a version of the eStand while
conducting the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival. He liked it so
much, he said, that he plans to purchase one.

Page turning "is a pain," he said. "Just the fact that you could touch a
screen and get to the next page is weird and wonderful."

One of the few people who have assessed both products is Mike Albaugh,
director of music at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. Mr.
Albaugh, who recently bought 25 MusicPads for school use, said he found
them more durable than the eStand and that he liked the pledge from
Freehand Systems to fix anything that goes wrong.

He said the availability of music to load onto the machines was crucial.

"Freehand has purchased the rights to a lot of works within the general
archives of music, and with us, it's about the standard works," Mr.
Albaugh said. He said the digital tablets would save paper and serve as
a time-efficient teaching tool. What's more, he said, the backlighted
screens, which can be used in landscape or portrait orientation, can
help ensure that a pit ensemble's sound does not thin out because half
the violinists need to turn a page.

Whether the machines will be warmly received by Interlochen students
remains to be seen. Liz Koch, 18, an oboist, said she found the MusicPad
easy to use but that she didn't appreciate its high price. "It would
also be inconvenient to carry," she said.

Travis Dierolf, 17, who plays trombone, said the idea was good but that
he would not trust the MusicPad in a performance. "While the marking
functions seemed promising, I think that whenever you have you more
technology you have more things that can go wrong," he said.

As for David Bowie, Mr. Garson said that all his boss cared about is
"making sure you play the right stuff when it matters," and that like
most rock stars he never uses sheet music.

"Still, I think I'm going to get him a MusicPad for his birthday with
all his thousands of lyrics entered onto it," he said. "I think it would
be a really nice thing for someone so prolific to have."