The End Of Finale...

In the last week of August, I received an email from the computer software company MakeMusic, as did all registered users of Finale. It was a terse, unapologetic notification that the thirty-six-year production run of its flagship music notation software was over—immediately. It can no longer be purchased or upgraded but will continue to work on devices where it is currently installed. There will be no further development or updates, and it will not be authorized on any new devices after a year. This news is surprising and upsetting to many composers, arrangers, professional musicians, and students who use it to fuel their careers and study. And it’s a significant inconvenience for me! Since I returned to using Finale a few years ago, I have over a hundred charts and transcriptions I’ve created with it. So, I’ll need to figure out what the best option for me is in the future. But the news got me thinking about my former life as a music copyist and how much work I did using Finale.

Soon after arriving in San Luis Obispo, CA, in the summer of 1997, I heard about a man living in Cambria, forty minutes north on Highway 1, who “worked on movie scores.” I finally got Brad Dechter's phone number—an orchestrator, arranger, composer, and woodwind player in Hollywood since 1981. When I called him, eager to take him to lunch and learn all about film scoring, he chuckled and told me the person I really should speak with was his neighbor, Stan Sheldone. I believe his last words were, “Good luck.” My subsequent call to Stan was odd, leaving me confused and discouraged, but he took me up on the lunch offer.

Stan grew up in a Hasidic community in New York City and, as a young man, played trumpet in Mort Lindsey’s band, leading to a long professional partnership. After putting the horn down, he worked as a music copyist and supervisor on many of Mort’s projects, including with Judy Garland, Barbara Streisand, and many years of the Merv Griffin Show. Sheldone Music Services was one of Hollywood's busiest independent (not associated with a studio) music preparation shops, which included orchestration, music copying, and contracting. He was a legendary mentor in the film and television music world, and many composers, orchestrators, music editors, and copyists got their start working for him. None left without a few scars and plenty of stories to tell. Years later, while working on scoring sessions in Los Angeles, I’d introduce myself to people I knew from his lore, and with a smile, they would say, “Oh, you’re one of Stan’s kids!” He had “retired” and moved to Cambria but kept a big office on the second floor of his home with a view of the Pacific Ocean and still did some film work for Lee Holdridge, Don Davis, Stanley Clarke, and Hummie Mann, and some print jobs for music publishing houses.

Stan was comically unkempt, simmering with an amusing, often satirical persona—especially on the phone, and he was always on the phone—reading glasses perched on his head and weary eyes bulging forth. His “schtick” skillfully blended a gruff but affable curmudgeon and self-deprecating, often self-proclaimed “schmuck” with the shrewd perception and graceful wit of the most accomplished fool. His sarcasm could not be constrained. At 6’2”, he looked like an outsized caricature of Henry Kissinger. As a young man, he was stationed in Japan with an army band, smitten by a Japanese girl living near the base. After being married, raising a family in southern California, and getting divorced, he found Haruyo again—they had been married for a while when I met him. She was a force of nature, a Japanese tea ceremony master, and frequently had college-age Japanese women coming up from Los Angeles to study traditional culture with her. Their home epitomized Japanese tidiness and aesthetics.

To begin working with Stan, I had to buy my first Apple computer—a G3 with four gigs of memory and a 21'“ “RasterOps monitor (that weighed a ton), Gardner Reed’s book “Music Notation,” and a licensed copy of Finale ‘97. We received hand-written scores via a fax machine that could print legal-size documents (on roll paper). Stan would enter the whole thing into Finale using a combination of MIDI and QWERTY keyboards. At that point, it would come to me to format and clean up the score and extract and format the individual parts—all in Finale. Then, the massive job of printing, copying, and taping parts and scores for twenty to thirty pieces of music to be played by a forty to seventy-piece orchestra in conjunction with a proofreader hired to come up from Los Angeles at the end of a project and find the mistakes. We worked around the clock the week preceding the recording session—usually in Seattle, London, or Los Angeles—so transport was the final logistical hurdle. Eventually, I was proof-reading as well. It was intense, hyper-focused, tedious work, and failure—either music not being delivered in time or mistakes that required expensive recording session time to fix—was unforgivable. Stan and I spent many sleepless nights together fighting against seemingly impossible deadlines. Sometimes, I also had to go to the recording session with him. Far from a “dream come true,” it was a nerve-wracking, tense experience I dreaded.

Stan was a pivotal figure in my professional growth. His criticism was direct, blunt, and often harsh—he knew how to cut deep. I never doubted his intention or lost trust in his guidance—but it made an impact by design and could hurt. He was fluent in Yiddish and Japanese and enjoyed choosing whichever language had the most appropriate and colorful response to my misguided questions or flashes of inexperience and incompetence. He always followed by reveling in an extended translation. Rarely have I met someone whose cultural brow extended so far in both vertical directions. I am grateful for the time I spent with him.

I worked with Stan in Cambria until I moved to Los Angeles. After that, I worked remotely until the end of the project, when I’d make the trek to the office for the final push. I was also picking up freelance copy projects in Los Angeles. So, I was using Finale nearly every day between 1997 and 2002. I knew the program as well as I have ever known any piece of software—every sub-menu, every dialogue box, every trick, and the details of every update. I was a go-to guy if you had a Finale question. When I started doing jobs for younger composers, I would get MIDI files instead of handwritten scores. They required quantization and listening to the reference recording to work the MIDI file into an accurate representation—almost more work than entering them with a keyboard.

Years after moving to Vermont and picking up ProTools again, I started composing and using Sibelius during the pandemic but couldn’t overcome the learning curve. So I dug up my old serial number, and MakeMusic honored it, enabling me to purchase Finale again at the discounted “upgrade” price—from my last licensed copy in 2003. Using it for simple head charts and transcriptions, I have not ventured deep into the many features, but it’s still a great tool, and it’s been fun to learn again after a twenty-year hiatus. Its sudden end is disappointing to me and a massive loss for the music community that depends on it. Do you use music notation software? Which one? If you’re a Finale user, have you decided what to do?