104: Double Barline

A tough week for people who write music

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune is a Joey Special. No hint today!

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 103
Rimsky-Korsakov, Trombone Concerto

Leave it to Listener Jeremy to set a trap using the one instrument that’s less appealing than the clarinet. Actually, it was Joey who laid the trap with his clue that referenced the London Olympics. He got us all thinking about British band music, which was reflected in many of the guesses: Elgar, Grainger, Holst, Arnold, Vaughn Williams, Sullivan, Smyth, Herbert Clark, and Arthur Benjamin (various suggestions from Listener Laurie, Listener Ellen, and myself [Will].) Listener Christopher went a little further afield with Sousa and Fučík.

I did have Rimsky in my basket though! However, the real winner was Listener Eric who emailed in with the exact correct answer.

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

Finale

Spare a bit of compassion for your local composer this week, because a lot of us have been waylaid by a jarring bit of news, inevitable as it may have been. Here’s the lede of the email we all got:

For over four decades, our engineers and product teams have passionately crafted what would quickly become the gold standard for music notation. However, as technology stacks have changed, and millions of lines of Finale code have added up, delivering incremental value for our customers has become exponentially harder over time. Instead of releasing new versions of Finale that would offer only marginal value to our users, we've made the decision to end its development.

OK, let me (Will) back up: Finale is a music notation software used by composers, orchestrators, and publishers throughout the music industry. It’s mainly used in America, but it has 45% of the global notation market share. It debuted in 1988 and it became the first professional graphic-interfaced notation software to gain traction among music professionals.

The fact that it’s over 40 years old means two things: 

1) every update was built upon pre-existing code that was created for outdated operating systems. The bugs piled up and the developers basically gave up on trying to fix them. This is why I say that the news was inevitable.

2) By and large, the people currently using Finale are legacy users. (That group includes me; I’m almost sure that my mother bought me my first version of Finale when I was 15, so that would have been 1998.) That means that the people who are being hit with this news are people who have decades worth of music files written in Finale, and we’ve also spent decades learning how to use the software (the main video series dedicated to grappling with the program isn’t called Conquering Finale for nothing.)

I have spent the last four days reading endless posts, comments, emails, and texts about this news, and it’s way too much to quote or even digest in this post. Suffice to say, it’s a big deal, and there’s lots of technical reasons why files created in Finale can’t be opened in other notation softwares. We’re all going to have to use Finale to convert our files to an intermediary file type, and when we open those files in a new application, we will have lost lots of information about the finicky engraving details that we spend hours getting right.

(One important point that’s been omitted from a lot of the discussion: we always lost a lot of these details when Finale files were opened in Finale’s yearly “upgrades” of their own software.)

Finale has two main competitors in the notation space: Sibelius, a British software which got taken over in a soft coup in 2012 and is, frankly, next on the chopping block; and Dorico, a German software that hired all the refugee programmers from Sibelius. The Dorico people set out to create a new piece of software that would correct for all the problems that Finale and Sibelius could never solve because they were too laden with all that bloated code.

The three companies have been at war with each other ever since, and Dorico has proven the victor. They won so heartily, in fact, that they were able to exact punishing concessions from Finale. Finale’s existing users get to buy Dorico for a steeply discounted price, but Finale had to make their software completely inoperable starting a year from now. (Due to an upswell of anger, they have pulled back from the most extreme version of what this would look like.)

I’ve thought many times about converting to Dorico in the past, but the weight of so much inertia kept me from doing it, in spite of Finale’s various atrocities. (Another important point: nobody ever liked using Finale. The Finale Power Users Facebook group is a testament to that fact.) But now it’s time to step into that brave new world.

One thing that people have always said in the notation wars (which have been raging all these decades) is that neither Sibelius nor Dorico can handle “experimental” notation for avant garde scores nearly as well as Finale. So in that sense, this may turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

Tone Praise

Fauré, Pavane

A slightly melancholy but nerve-calming selection seems appropriate this week.

Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)