Igor Engraver is a scorewriter for the

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

and

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operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s, created by Swedish composer Peter Bengtson and published by the Swedish company NoteHeads. Bengtson stated on the Igor-Talk mailing list that he named Igor after the

stock character A stock character, also known as a character archetype, is a type of character in a narrative (e.g. a novel, play, television show, or film) whom audiences recognize across many narratives or as part of a storytelling tradition or convention. Th ...

in various horror movies (including the

Frankenstein ''Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'' is an 1818 Gothic novel written by English author Mary Shelley. ''Frankenstein'' tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a Sapience, sapient Frankenstein's monster, crea ...

films), and to commemorate Russian composer

Igor Stravinsky Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ( – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship (from 1934) and American citizenship (from 1945). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential 20th-century c ...

. Despite delays in publishing the first version, Igor Engraver was widely praised for its unprecedented ease of use and revolutionary user interface. Users also appreciated its ability to automatically create instrument parts from full scores rather than requiring them to be created separately. (This feature first appeared in the notation program Composer's Mosaic, but Igor's is one of the earliest implementations, well before those of Sibelius and Finale.) Igor is written almost entirely in the

Lisp programming language Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

. For a short time, Igor was released as freeware with the hope that online sales of scores would finance it. This was cancelled after it was found unfeasible. In 2002, Peter Bengtson retired from active involvement in the company, which is now owned by

Björn Ulvaeus Björn Kristian Ulvaeus (; born 25 April 1945) is a Swedish musician, singer, songwriter, and producer best known as a member of the musical group ABBA. He is also the co-composer of the musicals ''Chess (musical), Chess'', ''Kristina från Duve ...

(formerly of the pop group

ABBA ABBA ( ) were a Swedish pop group formed in Stockholm in 1972 by Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. They are one of the most popular and successful musical groups of all time, and are one of the List ...

), Christer Sturmark (a Swedish author, I.T. entrepreneur and debater on religion and humanism), Per Gessle (a member of the pop groups Gyllene Tider and

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), and Cons T. Åhs (a computer science researcher). The original Igor website URL www.noteheads.com redirects now to the page of Christer Sturmark; no new version of the program has been released. In 2009, a notice appeared on the website's original home page, addressing rumours about NoteHeads which had circulated on the Internet (without saying what the rumours were). It declared that the company was under new ownership, that a new version of Igor would be released in the near future, and that it would be free for users of version 1.7 (the last published version). There has been no activity since then.

References

{{Scorewriters Scorewriters Lisp (programming language) software

See also

References