Avid, the company that currently owns Sibelius, has decided to shut down the main development office and outsource development to a much smaller team in the Ukraine. You can read my general thoughts about the results of selling small, successful companies to bigger ones here:

There’s a takeaway here for developers. If you care about your product at all – and I’m assuming you do, because if you’re just in it for the money, you’re probably not making the kind of product I buy anyway – then don’t sell. The moment you sell your company, no matter how good the sum, you’ve sold out. I’ve seen it happen too many times to believe otherwise.

Don’t Sell (Out)→

Today, I published an open letter to the executives at Avid, imploring them to take the right step by their customers: sell the product back to its inventors, Ben and Jonathan Finn, who have already offered to buy it twice.

Sell Sibelius. It is public knowledge that the Finn brothers have offered at least twice to purchase the software back from you, in the dual interests of maintaining the momentum of the software and of taking care of the employees you have let go. Selling it back to them is the right move – for your customers, for the product, for the developers, and most importantly, for Avid. The goodwill of your customer base and the trust of your own employees are not small things in the long run.

Dear Avid: Please Sell Sibelius→

Will this – or any of the similar efforts being made in the broader Sibelius community – make a difference? The truth is, it’s unlikely. But it’s worth a shot.

You know music has power when it has you shivering while running in hundred-degree heat.

Güngör’s Ghosts Upon the Earth is like that, though. From the opening track, the album screams its willingness to be and do something terribly different from most Christian music of the last quarter century. For one thing, this is an album, not just a collection of songs. For another, the musical skill on display here combines with a willingness to forge a new sound, rather than retread the same old pop-rock milieu one more time.

Musical and lyrical unity in an album is a rarity today in any genre, but this album tells a story. Indeed, it tells the story.

But back to those shivers. Read on, intrepid explorer →

Art is always a thing of its own moment. Not in a postmodern, deconstructive sense, but in the simple reality that it is created when it is created, and not at some other time. I first conceived this post walking home from Hastings last night – I’d spent the evening preparing to teach a class at church this morning. Ideation, then, happened in a particular environment (walking down a sidewalk beside a reasonably busy street) at a particular time (between 9:15 and 9:30 pm on a Saturday night). More than that, however, it happened this Saturday night after that study. Had I been thinking another night, or after some other study, I would have thought different thoughts. Read on, intrepid explorer →

I awoke this morn To robinsong and quiet rain A quiet beauty Unmatched—far less surpassed— By mortal excellencies

In which, inspired by Shore’s work on the film scores, I ponder Tolkien’s masterpiece. At length. (While glossing over some of the linguistic inspiration for Tolkien’s myth.)

The triumph of Howard Shore’s score for The Lord of the Rings films is that it makes me want to reread the books. Again. Read on, intrepid explorer →