Decades' Worth of Musical History Is About to Disappear. You've Probably Heard Nothing About It.

Last month, nothing short of an earthquake-level upheaval struck the professional music industry. On Aug. 26, the president of the Colorado-based tech company MakeMusic announced that the firm would be making "no further updates" to Finale, the pioneering and popular music-notation app that the firm had been selling and updating for 35 years. "Technology stacks change, Mac and Windows operating systems evolve, and Finale's millions of lines of code add up," MakeMusic's Greg Dell'Era wrote in his first (and likely last) contribution to the company's Finale-centric blog. "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." In other words: A key computer program for digitizing and expediting the arduous process of writing and formatting the types of sheet music used by musicians and ensembles everywhere--orchestras, schoolkids, the theater world, session instrumentalists, pop producers--would be phased out by the following year, with no hopes for revival.