Northern Music Online Blog

The boffins at MakeMusic have been beavering away, and now once again they attempt to make life a little better for all those of us who write with music software by updating the worlds best selling music notation program, PrintMusic 2009. So, have they succeeded? 

Evolution, not revolution.

Improving on a program like this was always going to be tricky. On the one hand, users continually demand more from their music notation software; on the other, MakeMusic already has two notation programs ( Finale Allegro and Finale 2009) in the range above PrintMusic, for which the highest levels of functionality and performance must be kept in reserve. Plus, all Finale music software must be seen to be keeping ahead of rival Sibelius software in terms of facilities and value for money.

What’s New?

Composers and arrangers will enjoy the improved interface and streamlined workflow; the less steps in between the creative impulse and getting it down, the happier we are. Also new in PrintMusic 2009 is the ability to drag and drop expression markings and flexible expression editing. Elsewhere, MusicXML has been updated, allowing the import and export of MusicXML 2.0 files, which, unlike MIDI files allow the transfer of sounds and graphical elements in your files to other applications, including older versions of PrintMusic (back to 2006). In Print Music 2009, these files can now be compressed, making them much smaller and more transportable. XML Import also recognises advanced score features such as fretboards, composite time signatures, and articulation markings such as slurs, etc.

In practice, a lot of users like to scan music and then manipulate it using software, and PrintMusic 2009 facilitates this with the inclusion of SmartScore Lite by Musictek. One way in which 2009 moves forward is in it’s improved ability when scanning polyphonic music. Both Mac and Windows users can scan directly from SmartScore Lite, but it’s worth checking what scanner you are using, as it can work better with some than with others - MakeMusic’s own published examples use a Canon N670U, although Epson scanners are recommended. Please note that a dedicated scanner generally will produce the best results compared to an all-in-one machine . Owners of Intel based Macs are at no disadvantage, either. Bear in mind that you should expect to have to deal with some edits, but the number of these can be mercifully few when compared with other programs. Remember too that scanning software is designed to deal with engraver music, and not handwritten scores.

Score markings have been rationalized in PrintMusic 2009, with markings easily selectable from a grid display. Once entered into the score, markings can quickly be edited or moved around. Dynamic markings, lyrics, expressive text, tempo and rehearsal markings,  plus techniques such as arco and pizzicato can all be easily applied to your score, and you can then hear the results. The Human Playback feature further enhances the results, with 15 preset options such as Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Latin, Rock etc. serving to help realize the sound of your piece as you intended it. Even the music entered via mouse can have a live performance quality to it; this is really a great feature in what is essentially a mass market rather than an elitist product, and the difference in sound quality with Human Playback can be striking indeed!

All in all, the new features on offer with PrintMusic 2009 represent refinements to what is already a very successful score writing program. Existing features have been enhanced, and the user experience benefits as a result. The Print Music 2009 upgrade will no doubt also do very well, as it offers all the latest refinements to existing PrintMusic users for a relatively small outlay; however, power users do also have the choice of upgrading to Finale 2009, which offers truly world class score writing features, for a very attractive cost indeed. Anyone interested in buying or upgrading to PrintMusic 2009 or Finale 2009 should contact the UK’s Finale specialist, www.northernmusiconline.co.uk

Funny thing, reality TV. So often there’s voting involved; which, as we know, can lead to all sorts of amusement. Here is television, which we have already paid for, but for which we are then asked to pay again. And since business is about selling, with potentially large revenues at stake, just how much does that dictate the format of the show? And who, exactly, does the voting?

Take BBC 1’s ‘Last Choir Standing’. A surprising package, which had the potential to drag out a series of summer Saturdays to something approaching infinity, yet which instead chose to hurtle us, all unprepared, towards the autumn schedules. The standard of the choirs as the competition progressed must have shocked many viewers, along with the breadth and scope of the musical arrangements. Witness amateur musicians of all ages, getting together for the joy of singing, passionately creating something bigger than the sum of it’s parts - choral song. It was quite astonishing to see just how far the spur of competition drove the choirs to raise their game, delivering performances and musical arrangements that would not have been out of place in a big budget movie musical.

In the season finale, we had ‘Only Men Aloud’, a Welsh Male Voice choir, singing, with no apparent irony, ‘All By Myself’; Ysgol Glanaethwy, a dynamic young mixed choir, also from Wales, performing ‘O Fortuna’ from Carmina Burana; and Revelation, the only remaining Gospel choir, who delivered a stunning version of Mcfadden and Whitehead’s ‘Ain’t No Stoppin Us Now’. If you’d like a quick precis of events, with a list of who sang what, you could visit http://www.lastchoirstanding.com/

Still, there’s no denying that part of the fun in following these Saturday Night talent fests is in predicting how the voting will work out. Not wishing to take anything away from the eventual winners, Only Men Aloud, but on the evidence available one could be forgiven for thinking that the Nation held a bias against Gospel choirs. Looking at the simply mystifying ejection of the superlative ACM Gospel choir in the semi-final, it was hard to see where they might have gone wrong. Having delivered a truly breathtaking performance of ‘Joyful, Joyful’ from Sister Act II, (the best live choral performance I can recall seeing on TV) you had to wonder, were they simply too good for this competition? You can get an idea of the impression created by hearing them live in the studio by visiting Ian Wylie’s blog post, http://blogs.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/ianwylie/2008/08/last_choir_standing.html My own theory on this is that there are in fact two ‘publics’ - there’s the viewing public, and the voting public, and grasping the difference between the two is fundamental to understanding the quirky nature of the results in TV talent competitions, which have shown a tendency to skew in favour of various minorities. The default position, for many viewers switching on the TV, is ‘I’ve paid for my license, I’ll let others pay to vote.’ I, for instance, hold rigidly to that view. Usually. But then your best intentions go out of the window when you realise that you have something in common with one of the participants - be it geography, or some other bias, and in seconds you are reaching for the phone, not once, but two, three or more times. Which in this case is just great for the BBC. Yet, for the non-voters amongst us at least, it honestly felt a little odd to witness a situation where, in the latter stages, stunning contestants were excluded one after another until only the most traditional remained. Yes, we had a winner. But did the process necessarily reveal the best choir, or merely what we British expect a choir to be like? Watching the final, I was left with the intriguing thought that a non-British audience might have voted very differently. 

So, in the interests of equanimity, I would like to propose a new system - One viewer, one (free) vote. Then we could all have our say, and may the best contestant win. But it might just take the fun out of it, though…

So who’s your favourite bass player?  Lovers of the upright jazz/bass will put their hands up for Charles Mingus or perhaps the wonderful English player Danny Thompson.  The brilliant and ultimately tragic Jaco Pastorius still has a big cult following and old rockers will tell you that you can’t beat a bit of Bill Wyman.  For me, The Who’s thunderous Jon Entwhistle cannot be mastered.  Not only am I a fan, I was also lucky enough to be probably, the last person to interview him for television before his untimely death at the beginning of The Who’s Millenium world tour.

The interview came about because Yorkshire Television wanted to celebrate the making of The Who - Live at Leeds, one of the handful of truly great live rock recordings.  We were invited to make a short ten minute piece with the big fella’ at his home, a seventeenth century mansion in the Cotswolds.  We arrived at midday to find, like all proper rock stars, Jon Entwhistle was  still in bed.  We were shown to the bar by Jon’s guitar technician and told “Jon will join you shortly.”   When I say bar, I’m not talking a little cocktail thing in a corner with a bottle of drambuie inside a furry pink poodle.  This was a full blown pub inside the house, called “The Barracuda Tavern”.  Huge stuffed game fish hung on wires from the ceiling.  Jon’s hobby we were told was fishing for barracuda.

Jon joined us within half an hour.  We sat on two tall stools at the bar and the camera started rolling.  I posed my first question “Live at Leeds is regarded has one of The Who’s finest achievements, can you remember much about how it came about?
“I beg your pardon!”
I asked the question again.
“Look I,m  sorry, but you’re going to have to speak a lot louder.”  Jon’s guitar tech interrupted.  You will have to shout Ian.. Jon is very deaf.  All those years of playing at maximum volume have shot his eardrums to pieces.

The interview took about an hour to complete.  I shouted myself hoarse.  And then had my own ear drums blasted when Jon picked up his bass and played a full throttle version  of ‘Yong Man Blues.”  Our own private rock concert.

As we packed up to leave, Jon’s American girl friend asked us if we’d like to stay for dinner.

We had to decline, telling them that we had to be in London to film a sequence about The Sex Pistols with a director called Julian Temple.

Jon rose up from his stool.   ‘Well you’ll have more fun here!”  I’m  sure we would have done.

The fuller version of this story and much more is now available in Ian’s latest book “Bringing it all back home“

My Grandmother’s Father was a horsekeeper at Glasshoughton Colliery. He drank his evening pint at the Royal oak pub and otherwise only ventured from his little house in Churchfield Lane to tend his allotment. I wonder what he would have though if someone had told him “In the next century we’re going to knock this coal mine down, do away with the coke ovens and brickworks and on the slag heaps build restaurants, hotels and a great big ski slope with real snow and casll it X-scape.” Actually I know what he would have thought and said, but I don’t need to repeat it here.

Some things seem preposterous, unreal, but then in time comes familiarity. It’s not such a surprise these days to see young people in alpine clothing heading down the motorway with skis on their roof racks following signs to Glasshoughton. But how many of these people know much about the proud industrial heritage of the village? That the glass in Glasshoughton refers to glassblowing and making and that here was a pit that for over a century employed thousands of men?

And how many of you reading this know that Glasshoughton played a minor role in the development of blues music in this country? In the 1950’s the legendary Big Bill Broonzy was one of the first Delta Blues singers to tour Europe. Broonzy had been brought up behind the mule in the cottonfields of Arkansas. His Grandmother was an emancipated slave. Between the 1920’s and 1958 when he died he made thousands of recordings of authentic country blues. In 1956 he found himself in the north of England, he recorded a live session in a theatre in Nottingham and performed in a Jazz club in Leeds. The story goes that a showbiz entrepreneur owed a favour to a cinema owner. The cinema in question was ‘The Cosy’ at Glasshoughton. One saturday night Big Bill Broonzy was despatched from Leeds to play there. What the youth of Cannon Street near the cinema made of it is anybody’s guess. But apparently it was a great night. I have been told by one or two who went that “I should have been there.”
And my mate Kevin Reynolds tells me that when he first started as an apprentice at Atkinson’s Printers in Pontefract that they still had archive copies of the poster. Long before TV adverts enticed shoppers and skiers to Glasshoughton, The Cosy Cinema encouraged music fans to come and see Big Bill Broonzy.

P.S. The Cosy incidentally closed down in the sixties like lots of other Cinemas. It became a clothing factory called Castletex. This was knocked down in the late 1990’s and the area is now a car park.

Pub 26th October 2006

I did an interview for television with Mr James Corrigan just a few weeks before he died. Mr Corrigan was arguably the greatest of all music and showbiz entrepreneurs in Yorkshire. In the middle of the 1960’s he bought a piece of derelict land in Bradford Road, Batley which had once been the site of a municipal sewage works. He had a vision to create an entertainments venue to rival anything in the West End. Within sixteen short weeks he had built, opened and recruited thousands of members to what became world famous as the Batley Variety Club. Mr Corrigan was impressed first of all by supermarkets that were springing up in every Northern town. He thought that the pile it high and sell it cheap principle could be applied to showbiz. If you had a big enough revenue, a long enough residency and plenty of willing punters you could bring in big stars at reasonable ticket prices.

Batley variety club opened with The Batchelors. Within months it was attracting the likes of Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones. In 1969 Mr Corrigan pulled off his biggest coup. Along with a colleague he travelled to New York with a case of pound notes to visit the office of Joe Guy. Now Joe Guy was a hard-nosed showbiz agent with a roster that read like a who’s who of jazz music; Billy Holiday, Lional Hampton, Roy Eldridge, Benny Carter and the man Mr Corrigan was interested in, Louis Armstrong. A deal was struck to bring Louis, the greatest trumpeter in the history of jazz to Batley, a place that Joe Guy and Armstrong had never heard of.

At the time of the three week residency, the song “What A Wonderful World” was riding high at number one in the charts. The club was packed every night.

With a twinkle in his eye in his last ever interview Mr Corrigan told me about a joke they played on Louis Armstrong. They picked him up from Leeds Airport in a Rolls Royce and chauffeured him to Batley. In the middle of town the driver stopped outside a badly derelict mill. The roof was falling in, all the windows broken. In the street outside mucky kids were playing with busted footballs and rusting bikes. “Welcome to Batley variety Club” said Mr Corrigan. Louis Armstrong and his team looked aghast. Mr Corrigan smiled and said “only kidding” before instructing his driver to continue on to the real club. They say Armstrong’s face was a picture. What a wonderful world!