How Visionary Software Was Lost to a Perfect Storm of Mismanagement, Markets, and Social Vanity Stureplan I've had numerous requests over the years to publicly tell the story about how and why NoteHeads, the company I founded to develop Igor Engraver, collapsed in the early 2000s. I've never done so as it never was that important, but now, with Ooloi on the horizon (however it's going to turn out) it's crucial that it isn't perceived a revenge project. It's not; it's simply closure in Clojure. With interest in Ooloi building, I've decided it's time to tell my side of the story. In doing so, I had to name names – an unproblematic decision as this was, after all, nearly 30 years ago. I've moved on, and I'm sure everybody else has too. Prologue: The Auction Picture this scene: a solicitor's office near Stockholm's Stureplan in late 2001. In one room sit Christer Sturmark – future secular humanist celebrity – and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA fame, who never spoke, moved, or changed his facial expression during the entire process. Ice-cold pop star. In another, I sit alone, connected by crackling international phone lines to Los Angeles, where Esa-Pekka Salonen, one of the world's greatest conductors, waits to learn the fate of software he too has invested in. Salonen, in turn, has Randy Newman on the line, film composer and subsequently Oscar winner and also a share holder. This auction represents the musical world's last desperate attempt to save work that the financial world had already written off. By the end of that surreal session, they had acquired Igor Engraver and NoteHeads Musical Expert Systems for a paltry 200,000 SEK. I received not a penny. What followed was an instructive disaster: the systematic destruction of genuinely revolutionary music software by what can only be described as a cavalcade of ideologues, incompetents, and narcissists who fundamentally misunderstood what they had purchased.
 What We Built: Software That Thought Like Musicians Igor Engraver, launched in 1996, was genuinely ahead of its time. Unlike conventional music notation programs that trapped users in rigid 'modes', Igor worked the way musicians actually think – like composing with pen and music paper, but with the power of computation behind it. Many aspects of its humanised MIDI playback haven't been rivalled in terms of realism to this very day. The concept was sufficiently sophisticated to attract some of the finest programming minds available: Common Lisp developers who grasped the elegant abstractions immediately. Common Lisp wasn't common then; finding programmers who could think in its functional paradigms was difficult. But when you found them, they understood instantly what we were trying to achieve. Professional musicians recognised the difference. Even today, in 2025, I receive occasional messages from musicians who miss Igor and wonder whether they can somehow run the now-ancient program in emulators or simulators. This isn't mere nostalgia; it's testimony to software that solved problems other programs didn't even recognise.
Strategic Missteps: When Money Doesn't Understand Music But ideological programmers weren't our only challenge. Feature creep, driven by investors who fundamentally misunderstood our market, began to derail our development timeline. I remember one VC board member declaring: 'Igor will be unsellable unless it has guitar tablature for pop music'. I resisted strenuously. Igor Engraver was designed for serious composition work - the kind that attracted interest from conductors like Salonen and composers like Newman. Adding pop guitar tablature would delay our core engine whilst appealing to a completely different market segment. We risked losing our competitive advantage in professional notation to chase a crowded amateur market. But the VC bastards persisted, and eventually prevailed. Had we stuck to the original plan, we would have delivered Igor 1.0 well before Sibelius completed their rewrite and hit the market. Instead, we found ourselves implementing features that diluted our core value proposition whilst our window of opportunity slowly closed. This painful lesson directly influenced Ooloi's architecture years later – I designed its plugin system to integrate so tightly with the core engine that specialised features can be added without delaying or compromising the fundamental software. Those who want guitar tablature can have it; those who don't aren't forced to wait for it.  Igor's guitar tablature  The Perfect Storm: When History Intervenes By 2001, we were deep in negotiations with Steinberg and Yamaha – serious players who understood what we'd built. The figures discussed were substantial. Then September 11th happened. Overnight, merger and acquisition activity globally simply stopped. The 75 million SEK we'd invested (in today's purchasing power) suddenly appeared as unrecoverable risk to our venture capital backers. The liquidation process began almost immediately. That surreal auction near Stureplan represented the musical community's final attempt to preserve work that the financial community had already abandoned. Salonen participating by international phone line, with Newman connected through him, wasn't mere courtesy – it was desperate professionals trying to save tools they couldn't replace.  PB in 1996, at 35 My Departure: Internal Politics I was removed from the company in 2001, a year before the final collapse. Having architected all of Igor Engraver from the ground up, having written large parts of the code, having assembled the programming talent that made our technical achievements possible, and having built the customer relationships that kept professional musicians loyal to our software, I found myself systematically marginalised through internal corporate manoeuvring. The tragedy wasn't personal displacement – founders get displaced regularly in technology ventures. And to be fair, I may well have been exhausted and worn out by the tribulations at this point. I remember hearing of someone on the VC circuit remarking, 'Peter Bengtson? Is he still standing up?' We had already removed our main venture capitalist after discovering he was a swindler with eight bankruptcies behind him, and had to reconstruct the company accordingly. Losing him, we were also lucky to lose the somewhat larger-than-life 'inventor' – really the commercialiser – of the hotel minibar. And it wasn't a pleasant process. A motley crew indeed. However, after my departure, NoteHeads had no deep musical expertise left, only pop zombies who barely could read music (ABBA, Roxette). Kind of a rudderless situation for a music notation company. The real tragedy was watching people who fundamentally misunderstood what they'd inherited slowly destroy something that worked. Sturmark's Stewardship: From Function to Personality Cult When Christer Sturmark assumed control around 2002, the transformation was swift and rather revealing. The company website, previously focused on software capabilities and user needs, became what remaining employees described as a 'personality cult' site featuring photographs primarily of Sturmark himself, along with Ulvaeus and other celebrity associates. I observed all these things strictly from the outside. Meanwhile, customer service, which had been our competitive advantage, simply evaporated. Professional musicians who depended on Igor Engraver for their livelihoods found themselves ignored with what can only be described as systematic thoroughness. Promised updates never materialised. Development stagnated. For a long time, the original NoteHeads site displayed a monument to negligence: 'Stay tuned with Noteheads as more news will follow shortly!' – text that became, in the words of one long-suffering user, 'a cause for considerable ridicule and later palpable anger' amongst professional musicians. Sturmark's motive for acquiring NoteHeads appeared less about technical stewardship than social preservation. With prominent popcultural figures like Ulvaeus involved, it seemed crucial for him not to lose face. The acquisition allowed him to maintain standing among his celebrity peers, but once that purpose had been served, he lost interest. It was as if he hoped the subject would quietly dissolve and be forgotten. There were some internal movement and reshuffles, and then everything went quiet. I know very little about what went on inside NoteHeads during that period. The Customer Revolt Nobody Heard Magnus Johansson, who had worked on Swedish localisation, captured the professional community's fury in a devastating response to Sturmark's dismissive comments. Speaking to the business publication Realtid, Johansson said: 'Customers were furious at the very poor or non-existent response they got from Noteheads under Christer Sturmark; the company very rarely responded.' These weren't casual users annoyed by delayed patches. These were working musicians whose professional output depended on software that was slowly dying whilst its new owner pontificated about rationalism in Swedish newspapers. As Johansson observed: 'Under Peter Bengtson's time at Noteheads, contact with customers had been very close and good.' The contrast with Sturmark's approach couldn't have been starker. The full testimony, published in Realtid under the headline 'Noteheads customers were furious with Sturmark', provides a rather devastating account of corporate negligence disguised as rational management. The Final Insult: 'A Hobby Project' Years later, when questioned about NoteHeads by business journalists, Sturmark dismissed the entire enterprise as 'a hobby project'. This from someone who would eventually position himself internationally as a champion of rational thinking and Enlightenment values. It might have been a hobby project for him, but the dismissal reveals everything about Sturmark's fundamental misunderstanding of what he'd acquired. As Magnus Johansson noted: 'Such a comment shows that he didn't understand that Igor Engraver was a serious product that many customers were dependent on in their professional work'. A hobby project doesn't attract acquisition interest from Steinberg and Yamaha at hundred-million-plus valuations. A hobby project doesn't inspire Esa-Pekka Salonen to participate in desperate rescue auctions via international phone, with Randy Newman connected through him. A hobby project doesn't generate customer loyalty so intense that users still seek ways to run the software decades later. The Deeper Pathology: When Ideology Meets Innovation The Igor Engraver story illuminates something troubling about how ideological performance can coexist with technical failure. Here we had genuine innovation created by brilliant programmers who managed to produce elegance amid ideological absurdity. But the real damage came later, when that innovation was placed in the hands of someone more interested in appearances than stewardship. Sturmark – future celebrity of Swedish secular humanism – ultimately demonstrated the gap between intellectual performance and actual responsibility. Someone who would lecture internationally about rational thinking and Enlightenment values proved incapable of the most basic rational business practice: understanding what he'd purchased and maintaining relationships with the people who depended on it. Lessons in Character Revelation The tragedy isn't merely business failure – technology companies fail regularly, and such failures teach valuable lessons. The tragedy is the destruction of something functional and valued through ideological blindness and systematic negligence, seasoned with what appears to have been considerable narcissistic indifference. More troubling still is watching the primary destroyer of this innovation receive decades of international acclaim as a beacon of rational thinking. The irony would be comedic if the consequences weren't so real for the professional musicians who lost software they depended upon. Christopher Hitchens understood that the most effective way to evaluate someone's proclaimed principles is to examine their behaviour when they think nobody important is watching. Hitchens, one of my household gods (and one of the leaders of the same secularist humanist movement to which Sturmark wanted to belong), stood for truth, authenticity, and moral clarity without fear of consequence – all qualities of which Sturmark had none. Hitchens would have eviscerated him.  Hitch Epilogue: What Dies When Innovation Dies Igor Engraver died not from market forces or technical obsolescence, but from simple negligence. Professional musicians lost software that thought like they did. The programming community lost an elegant demonstration of what Common Lisp could achieve in creative applications. Swedish technology lost an opportunity to lead in professional creative software. Most significantly, we lost an example of what happens when technical innovation serves human creativity rather than ideological posturing or personal aggrandisement. The ultimate lesson isn't about software development or business management. It's about character. When someone shows you through their actions – not their words – who they really are, believe what you see. The real test of rational thinking isn't the ability to write elegant prose about scientific values. It's how you treat actual people whose professional lives depend on your competence when you think the broader world isn't paying attention. On that measure, the Igor Engraver story tells us everything we need to know about the difference between intellectual performance and genuine responsibility. Sources
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AuthorPeter Bengtson – SearchArchives
January 2026
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