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Ooloi is designed and built by Peter Bengtson.
Peter is a concert organist, opera composer, and cloud architect who has been programming since the age of twelve, starting on a Philips P1100. He began writing Lisp at eighteen, in 1979. He has written Lisp compilers, taught algorithmic composition using Lisp at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, and spent decades working inside CLOS and the Common Lisp Object System — a tradition that valued expressiveness, creative freedom, and trust in the programmer over doctrinal purity. That background shapes Ooloi's architecture at every level.
Between 1996 and 2001, he led a team of eighteen to create Igor Engraver, a music notation system written in Common Lisp that introduced semantic modelling to the field. Igor attracted USD 7.5 million in investment (2024 equivalent) and the serious interest of conductors and composers. The project ended in 2002 after a combination of venture capital pressure, management-imposed feature creep, and the collapse of M&A activity following September 11, 2001. The technical architecture was sound; the business environment was not. A detailed account is documented separately.
Professionally, Peter has worked as an AWS Principal Solutions Architect, designing large-scale distributed systems. His compositions include the opera The Maids (after Jean Genet), which remains the most internationally performed Swedish opera.
Ooloi is what happens when someone returns to unfinished work with thirty years of additional experience. It shares no code with Igor Engraver but inherits its founding conviction: that music notation is a semantic problem, not a graphical one, and that getting the representation right is the precondition for getting everything else right. Peter chose Clojure — a return to Lisp, which he has called "Clojure for closure" — because its immutability, Software Transactional Memory, and compositional philosophy provide the foundations Igor never had.
It is a sole-authored project. The core engine is architecturally closed: a deliberate choice to protect the correctness of the functional core while opening the plugin system to any JVM language. Musicians, engravers, and developers who want to extend Ooloi can do so in Java, Kotlin, Scala, or any language that runs on the JVM, without needing to understand the Clojure internals. The reasoning behind this approach is explained in detail on the blog.
The software is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. The core is written in Clojure. Rendering uses Skija (Skia for the JVM). Communication between client and server uses gRPC. The system runs on the JVM across macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Peter is a concert organist, opera composer, and cloud architect who has been programming since the age of twelve, starting on a Philips P1100. He began writing Lisp at eighteen, in 1979. He has written Lisp compilers, taught algorithmic composition using Lisp at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, and spent decades working inside CLOS and the Common Lisp Object System — a tradition that valued expressiveness, creative freedom, and trust in the programmer over doctrinal purity. That background shapes Ooloi's architecture at every level.
Between 1996 and 2001, he led a team of eighteen to create Igor Engraver, a music notation system written in Common Lisp that introduced semantic modelling to the field. Igor attracted USD 7.5 million in investment (2024 equivalent) and the serious interest of conductors and composers. The project ended in 2002 after a combination of venture capital pressure, management-imposed feature creep, and the collapse of M&A activity following September 11, 2001. The technical architecture was sound; the business environment was not. A detailed account is documented separately.
Professionally, Peter has worked as an AWS Principal Solutions Architect, designing large-scale distributed systems. His compositions include the opera The Maids (after Jean Genet), which remains the most internationally performed Swedish opera.
Ooloi is what happens when someone returns to unfinished work with thirty years of additional experience. It shares no code with Igor Engraver but inherits its founding conviction: that music notation is a semantic problem, not a graphical one, and that getting the representation right is the precondition for getting everything else right. Peter chose Clojure — a return to Lisp, which he has called "Clojure for closure" — because its immutability, Software Transactional Memory, and compositional philosophy provide the foundations Igor never had.
It is a sole-authored project. The core engine is architecturally closed: a deliberate choice to protect the correctness of the functional core while opening the plugin system to any JVM language. Musicians, engravers, and developers who want to extend Ooloi can do so in Java, Kotlin, Scala, or any language that runs on the JVM, without needing to understand the Clojure internals. The reasoning behind this approach is explained in detail on the blog.
The software is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. The core is written in Clojure. Rendering uses Skija (Skia for the JVM). Communication between client and server uses gRPC. The system runs on the JVM across macOS, Windows, and Linux.
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Ooloi is an open-source desktop music notation system for musicians who need stable, precise engraving and the freedom to notate complex music without workarounds. Scores and parts are handled consistently, remain responsive at scale, and support collaborative work without semantic compromise. They are not tied to proprietary formats or licensing.
Ooloi is currently under development. No release date has been announced.
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