The New York Times' first article about digital sheet music and tablets that display them. By writer Adam Baer.

1. 6/9/2016 At the Ready, Sheet Music Minus the Sheets - The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/20/technology/at-the-ready-sheet-music-minus-the-sheets.html?smid=tw-share 1/5
TECHNOLOGY
At the Ready, Sheet Music Minus the
Sheets
By ADAM BAER MAY 20, 2004
MIKE 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.

2. 6/9/2016 At the Ready, Sheet Music Minus the Sheets - The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/20/technology/at-the-ready-sheet-music-minus-the-sheets.html?smid=tw-share 2/5
''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

3. 6/9/2016 At the Ready, Sheet Music Minus the Sheets - The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/20/technology/at-the-ready-sheet-music-minus-the-sheets.html?smid=tw-share 3/5
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

4. 6/9/2016 At the Ready, Sheet Music Minus the Sheets - The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/20/technology/at-the-ready-sheet-music-minus-the-sheets.html?smid=tw-share 4/5
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.

5. 6/9/2016 At the Ready, Sheet Music Minus the Sheets - The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/20/technology/at-the-ready-sheet-music-minus-the-sheets.html?smid=tw-share 5/5
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.''
© 2016 The New York Times Company