A Little Byte Music -- Microsoft Alumni Bring Sheet-Music Sales To A Computer Screen Near You

Wend your way to a modest house in the Wedgwood neighborhood; turn right at the living room, where a wary cat may wind around your ankles; and head for a back room, where skis and exercise gear share space with a large, well-used array of computer equipment.

This is not somebody's home office.

This is a revolutionary zone.

Welcome to Sunhawk, a small new enterprise that may well change forever the way you buy sheet music. Not riffling through the stacks at a music store, but clicking your mouse on an Internet home page, where an electronic viewer obligingly plays excerpts of the music for you, so you can browse before you buy. The same little company is issuing interactive CD-ROMs that allow you to both play and print engraving-quality scores and choral parts of works such as Handel's "Messiah" - changing note color, tempo, page layout and any of 175 instruments during playback.

All you need is a Windows 95-equipped PC (Mac users can view the Web page, but can't access the scores) and a printer. Using Sunhawk's Solero software, you can print the second trumpet score, or see Handel's handwritten manuscript, or get another copy of the viola part that disappeared when the dog ate your homework.

You might call this the sort of thing Microsofties do when they grow up. Two former Microsoft software engineers, Marlin Eller and Brent Mills, teamed up when they tired of being Micro-minions and wanted to create the music software they had dreamed about for years. It has taken four years of planning and technical development to get to the point where packaging and marketing - in the hands of Mills' wife, Judy McOstrich - can carry the ball. Because Sunhawk offers something entirely new, McOstrich has some educating to do; the company has already offered one workshop and is planning to present more (call McOstrich at 206-528-0876, or e-mail her at judym@sunhawk.com).

So how does it work?

You get on the Internet and head for the company's Web site at http://www.sunhawk.com. You follow prompts to download Sunhawk's Solero Music Viewer and try a sample song. The viewer will not only show you the musical score, which you can fool around with in many fun ways, but it will play back the music to you (the notes highlight as they're played) on any of 175 different musical instruments. Tempo is one of the things you can adjust; you can create a sedate "Hallelujah Chorus" or make the majestic "Messiah" Overture positively race along.

If you choose to buy the music (prices run from about 99 cents to $3.95, roughly half what you pay in a music store), you can download the whole piece into your computer and print as many copies as you want, whenever you want, in high-quality formats that are virtually identical to what you'd buy in a music store. You also can print whatever you've bought from wherever you happen to be (if you're on vacation in Florida and you lost your copy of that Beethoven sonata, it's only as far away as a PC with an Internet hookup and a printer). Because the scores are nearly all public-domain classical music, the company doesn't have to worry about copyrights or royalties to J.S. Bach and Franz Schubert.

In addition to the Internet publishing, Sunhawk also is releasing a line of CD-ROMs called Digital Folios, one example of which is the newly released "Messiah" disc (future plans include the complete works of Mozart). These discs play back the musicwhile you watch the score on the screen, just as the Internet model does, and you can print any portion of the score on your own terms, with your PC's printer.

Unlike most other music-notation software, Solero can adapt to any kind of notation and can put ink on the paper at any point (not just on standard places), a fact that makes it particularly desirable for modern composers who write music in more venturesome ways. But it is more than notation (music-writing) software; the bulk of the Solero library is built by scanning music into the system, not by arranging notes from scratch on a blank screen.

The Solero technology bypasses the usual music-industry guesswork about the size of the print run, plus the trucking and warehousing involved in getting the sheet music to the stores. In music stores, sheet music takes up about half the floor space, but only provides 3 percent to 10 percent of the income. You never have to wonder what the music sounds like, because the system plays it for you before you order it - a boon to music students who want to find out if a new piece is worth the trouble of learning it.

"In the next 10 years," Eller says, "electronic scores will be the dominant way of publishing music. Our software is less like a novel, and more like a dictionary or a reference work. It's there whenever and wherever people want it."

However they may have operated at Microsoft, Eller and Mills don't look and act like representatives of the corporate culture. Their home-based setup, where Mills and McOstrich live, isn't fancy or crammed with status symbols. Their preferred chat mode is curled up on the couch, barefoot, in rumpled T-shirts; Eller is given to wearing black berets that make him look like a renegade Left Bank artist. Their work, the Solero software and the Sunhawk music-publishing business, is clearly not a corporate strategy; it's a labor of love.

To hear Eller tell it, the music-software idea was really the main concept that got Microsoft's original Windows started, during Eller's 13 years with the company.

"In 1982, we finished a project," Eller remembers, "and Bill (Gates) would always ask what you wanted to do next. I told him I wanted to do a music notation system. Bill's reaction was, `How big is the music composition market'? I told him it wasn't huge, but there was a great need for this software. There was clearly a lot of graphic programming to do.

"Bill said, you could write the program in a general way for spreadsheets and other stuff, and you would have a useful graphics library. So I started working on the graphics library, and that is what evolved into Windows."

Eller eventually got the itch to gaze out some different windows.

"I left two years ago," he explains. "The company had grown from 100 to 20,000 people during the time I was there. Essentially, Microsoft was a different company. I didn't want to work for a big outfit; I wanted a small one."

That is what he got, when he teamed up with Microsoft alum Brent Mills, a 28-year-old Toronto native who was recruited out of college by Microsoft, and who now is officially Sunhawk's chief technology officer. Eller is the chairman. McOstrich is director of marketing and sales. Everybody is a vice president.

Now, they're building a catalog. The method is simple: You start with the music Eller likes best (he's a trained musician, a singer, guitarist and pianist; McOstrich is a musician, too). You also request sample music from contemporary composers who might like to be published over the Internet. There's already some interest; classical composer Dimitri Cervo and jazz composer Daniel Barry are among the living musicians whose work is now being published by Sunhawk, and the company is pursuing agreements with rock bands and other new sources. As McOstrich puts it, "We're not just old dead guys."

So far, Sunhawk has about 3,000 pages of music available; they figure 100,000 pages is "the number of pages in a decent music store in a moderate-sized city." But the real goal is "everything."

Eller and Mills say they're still finding out who the major users of the new technology will be.

"The Major Orchestra Librarians Association seems to be fairly cranked about this," Eller says, after a trip to the group's annual convention to show them how their own orchestra's individualized bowings and other markings can be immortalized and printed on demand. High-school orchestras and bands can print out endless copies to give to endless students, and if the piccolo player loses the "Stars and Stripes Forever" on the band trip to Canada, a replacement copy is instantly available.

Sunhawk can reach the people who want "Fur Elise," country music, heavy metal. Some music, of course, will always be out of reach: The Beatles are pretty well covered by Michael Jackson and Sony.

"But maybe we'll get access," says the eternally optimistic Eller. A high-energy talker with mesmeric dark eyes, Eller is the kind of guy who could sell "Soldier of Fortune" subscriptions at a pacifists' convention.

One of the ironies of this business is that Eller and Mills, who are so ardent about their work, don't really see the bulk of their clientele because of the anonymity of the Net. They do know that a lot of their market is audiophiles; that amateur musicians, particularly players of the piano and guitar, are the most likely to visit their Web site and download the Solero music viewer. With an earlier CD-ROM, "Total Joplin" (devoted to the music of ragtime composer Scott Joplin), an astonishing 87 percent of the customers were nonmusicians, mostly males with higher incomes.

The company is still feeling its way forward. Because credit-card transactions cost about 25 cents plus a percentage of the sale, and sheet music is basically an inexpensive commodity per unit, Sunhawk wants to get past the single-unit, single-price stage by encouraging subscriptions that would have users pay a deposit of $19.95, payable toward purchases made from the site.

Librarians, teachers and other music professionals can buy an annual subscription to receive regular CD-ROM releases and unlimited one-year downloads from the Internet database (this "Solero Plus" subscription costs $599 annually; annual Internet subscriptions, offering unlimited downloads of the Internet catalog, are $359). The CD-ROMs, available separately, are $44.95 to$49.95.

And now, it's Christmas in July, with the newly released Handel CD popping into PCs of music lovers everywhere. Imagine how easy this will make the annual "Messiah" sing-alongs each year: no more lost or missing parts, because you just press "print."

Even Handel might shout "Hallelujah!"