Igor Engraver

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Igor Engraver is a music notation program, published by the Swedish company NoteHeads, and was produced for the Macintosh and Windows operating systems. It was originally created by Swedish composer Peter Bengtson, who stated on the Igor-Talk mailing list that he named it after the stock character Igor who appeared in various horror movies, including the Frankenstein series, as well as commemorating the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.

Despite delays in publishing the first version, it was widely praised by early users and beta-testers on the Igor-Talk mailing list for its unprecedented ease of use and its revolutionary user interface, and for its technique of drawing parts from the full score of a composition, instead of these being created separately. This meant that, if a change was made to the score, this was automatically reflected in the parts. This technique was used earlier in the music notation program Composer's Mosaic; but Igor adopted this technique well before Sibelius and Finale did, and so is very likely one of the earliest adopters of the technique.

Unusually for a program of this type, Igor is written almost entirely in Lisp.

For a short time, the program was made freeware, with the hope that the on-line sale of scores would finance the program; but this was cancelled after being found unworkable.

The company was later sold to new owners, and in 2002 Peter Bengtson retired from active involvement in the company, which is now owned by Björn Ulvaeus (formerly of the pop group ABBA), 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 Roxette), and Cons T. Åhs (a computer science researcher).^[1]

The web site at http://www.noteheads.com is still there but does not appear to have been maintained for some years (as of 2008), and a new version of the program has not appeared for a similar time, and the current status of the company and its software is not clear.