LiveCode and the Concert Pianist

One of the great uses of LiveCode is to create applications that perform tasks that are highly personalized yet deep and complex. I started studying the piano at age 7, majored in piano performance in college, and started a successful concert career as a young adult, playing in 44 countries with many of the world’s major orchestras. So it was a good success, but not huge, and had I continued in the normal way, I would probably have ended up teaching in a conservatory with modest performing activities on the side. 

Almost any task I do now has LiveCode attached to it.

The Sound of Success

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It is one of over 240 videos I made during the pandemic, when concert stages were dark and musicians were unemployed. This above example is a performance that I made in my home studio for 17 concert venues. By folding in images, titles, short custom-recorded spoken portions, and doing a little CGI magic, each video looks I played it specificially for that venue. LiveCode was everywhere in the process: communicating with other applications, setting schedules, providing a user interface, etc. Also, some of the LiveCode stacks that I’ve created for my live concerts are here:

• USolo:  — allows me to manipulate orchestra accompaniments so that they fit the tempos and timing of my playing.
• MeasureByMeasure:  — allows me to read, analyze, practice music, trigger accompaniments,etc.

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In the beginning…

What changed everything was Hypercard. Here was a free programming environment written for non-programmers. I wrote stacks that allowed me to display scanned images of my sheet music on the screen, to which I added all kinds of cool features like analysis graphics, foot pedal to turn the page in concerts, metronomes, tape recorder, tools to help me access and choose the best takes in recording sessions, ways to manipulate accompaniment sound files so I could play concertos with orchestra in piano recitals, etc. 

Hypercard was replaced with Metacard, Supercard, Revolution and now LiveCode, all of which I ate up ravenously.

Becoming a system

In 1994 I created OfficeRev, a system of stacks to allow me and a potential booking agent, who I imagined would use it, to mechanize many of the tasks of booking and playing concerts. The major parts of OfficeRev:

GigStack: a super-fast listing of several thousands contacts. Each card lists all pertinent information about each such as: History Field lists notes of all communications; Letters Field lists all emails, faxes, snailmail letters, scans of received paper letters — so that all correspondence is easily accessible; WhatIPlayed field lists what pieces I’ve played at that place; People field, About field, Street1, Street2, City, State, Phone, etc. 

GigLetters: stores and displays 1000’s of letters, writes boilerplate letters/emails/faxes for the finite number of situations that arise in the life of a booking agent and traveling musician. So for many situations, I can press a button and the letter is written.

Map Stack: locating venues and concerts on a giant map so that I can see the progress of a tour.

Everything but the kitchen sink

13 years ago, I hired a computer programmer, who works mostly in LiveCode. Together, we have exponentially expanded OfficeRev:

• GigStack: now has over 8000 contacts and is still super-fast.
• ProgramFigurer: puts together formatted recital programs — one of the banes of a soloist is sending in programs — they need to be laid out correctly! 
• TourPlanner: figures out tours which allow me to play two concerts per day based on drive-times from Google Maps API
• Various stacks update multiple websites.
• Musicians Stack: allows me to hire other musicians, pay them, send them end-of-year tax forms, etc. maintaining a portal web site that keeps them all apprised of upcoming and past concerts with me, sends them musical scores for upcoming gigs.
• ConcertAnnouncements: invites fans and potential presenters of upcoming concerts in their area. 
• ProjectView: project manager software that maps out projects along with Gantt charts and a system for keeping track of projects, accompanying documents, related emails, etc.
• Various financial stacks to track expenses, help me do my taxes, keep track of who paid, etc.
• ORSync: syncs all data between computers — mine, my wife’s, booking agent. (Our system allows each of us to add to the same card of the same stack even if we all happen to be offline!)
• Various calendar stacks: Yearly calendars to see a whole year’s worth of activities in a single card. Daily calendar with my activities. Daily to-do list which gathers from all the above what I and my booking agent and my wife who helps me need to do.

The above hardly describes this rich environment. Almost any task I do now has LiveCode attached to it.

The point: Over the past 40 years, I have made a living solely through playing classical and jazz concerts and selling recordings. Since 1994 when I created the first GigStack, I have played over 6500 piano recitals and hundreds of performances with orchestra, chamber ensemble and jazz ensembles. There were years when I played more than 300 concerts per year. Since about 2000, this has all been done with one local person from around town working at my house three days a week. Now, since 2020, I don’t even use a booking agent — the only person I employ is my programmer.

This approach to building a concert career has never been contemplated by experts on building solo concert careers. And to me the most impossible thing: I’m not famous! I can focus on the music, not publicity, nor the spiritually exhausting activity of ingratiating myself to “important” people because of what they can do for you. I play the music I like, not repertoire that some manager tells me is good for my career.

Sure, if you own a bank, you can hire an army to create software to do whatever you need. And since there are so many banks out there, entire industries create software to fulfill banks’ needs. But what about a unique but complex profession such as mine? For us, there is LiveCode!