Improving Playback from MuseScore 2 Piano Scores

This article looks at ways to improve the musical quality of playback from piano scores engraved with MuseScore 2. It isn’t a tutorial: it assumes a working knowledge of MuseScore 2, familiarity with the JACK audio connection kit, and the basics of music theory. Completed scores demonstrating the principles discussed can be found on YouTube:

• Piano Sonata in B-flat, 1st mov’t.
• Piano Sonata in B-flat, 2nd mov’t.
• Ch’ien
• Kun

Getting the best playback from MuseScore piano scores is largely a matter of deconstructing the things we do reflexively as pianists and turning them into instructions that can be understood by a musically brain dead performer, namely the computer. We’re scarcely aware when we play a simple tune with chordal accompaniment that we’re playing the right hand louder than the left, and emphasizing individual notes within the chords to make them euphonius. It’s only when we hit the Playback button in MuseScore for the first time that we hear how much performance information isn’t communicated in the score. The literal interpretation of the notes as they appear generally sounds ghastly.

The MuseScore development team set out to create a music notation program, not a tool for generating digital/audio performances. Playback therefore lacks the sophistication evident elsewhere in the program. Only the most basic parameters of note control are provided: pitch, duration, and loudness. Attack and release, the defining features of pianistic “touch”, are absent. Pedalling merely extends the length of notes; there is no corresponding change in tone colour. Half- and quarter-pedalling are impossible.

Just the same, remarkably good performances can be coaxed from MuseScore, provided you’re willing to invest the time. It’s painstaking work. Every note needs to be individually adjusted and there are no magic bullets.

The goal of tweaking a score for playback is not to achieve life-like piano sound, but a life-like interpretation. Limitations in the sampling technology used by MuseScore put truly realistic piano sound out of reach. A satisfactory approximation with no obvious flaws is what you should be aiming for. Once that is achieved, you have an adequate instrument with which to express yourself musically from the score. In much the same way as Bach sounds great on Aunt Sadie’s old upright when it’s played by an expert (assuming she keeps the thing in tune), MuseScore doesn’t need perfect Bösendorfer Imperial to generate sensitive digital performances.

Soundfonts

None of the freely available piano soundfonts is perfect. Some are just plain dreadful. Others come fairly close to what you want but exhibit flaws: no brilliance in the lower octaves, or too much of it at the high end, or resonance that sounds decidedly canned, or a few notes here and there that are always too loud or soft.
Of the free piano soundfonts, the Salamander Grand Piano listed in the MuseScore handbook isn’t half bad. There are some fairly decent Steinway soundfonts out there, too—again, not perfect, but usable. It’s a good idea to spend time scouring the Web for piano soundfonts, testing them one by one, and keeping any with promise. Having a library lets you choose which pianos are best suited to particular styles and genres. I have yet to come across a one-size-fits-all.

Equalization, Compression and Reverb

Creating a musically-satisfying performance from MuseScore mostly involves adjusting note velocities, i.e. the loudness of each note. In order to do so effectively, equalization and compression need to be applied to your audio output while you’re working on your score, not as an afterthought.

MuseScore does not provide equalization and compression. This means setting MuseScore’s I/O to use JACK and connecting MuseScore’s output, via qjackctl(1) or ladish, to external software. I use the JACK mastering software, JAMIN, which provides equalization, compression, and a look-ahead limiter. A really good tutorial on JAMIN, informatively written for the uninitiated, is Mastering with Jamin.

■ Equalization

Equalization allows you to adjust the overall timbre of your soundfont, making it richer, brighter, sweeter or more mellow according to your needs. How you adjust equalization is a matter of personal taste. Furthermore, each soundfont has differing requirements. Some need only a little help, others require a major facelift.
For piano soundfonts, adjusting the equalization curve for frequencies between 130Hz and 880Hz (approximately C3–A5) has the most effect. If the overall tone colour is too bright, emphasizing frequencies in the range of 294Hz–880Hz in a “mountain” curve whose peak is around 500Hz–525Hz will make the sound less brash. Conversely, a “valley” curve will enliven the timbre if it’s dull. A modest moutain curve between 880Hz–1800Hz may add a little sparkle, while a mountain curve between 155Hz and 330Hz can introduce some needed richness. A low-end shelf ending at around 130Hz can be used to add depth or remove boominess. A high-end shelf starting at around 3150Hz allows you to add to or trim the overall brightness of the sound.

■ Compression

Compression acts to normalize volumes and prevent clipping (i.e. when the volume exceeds 0dB and introduces distortion). It also affects timbre. Piano sound is rich in overtones, and compression may act on a range of overtones without affecting the volume of the fundamental, thus influencing tone colour. It’s best to use a three-band compessor (JAMIN provides this) with the low/medium crossover set at 116Hz and the medium/high at 1320Hz (approximately B-flat2 and E6, which corresponds to the cross-stringing of many grand pianos). Thresholds should be set between 10dB – -20dB, and makeup gain used to “finish” the sound. Weakness in the lower end can be fixed by raising the low compressor’s makeup gain, while adjustments to the high compressor’s makeup gain increase (or decrease) the prominence of high notes and overtones. Adjustments to the middle compressor’s makeup gain largely affects the “presence” of the sound without significantly altering tone colour.

■ Reverb

MuseScore provides a good reverb plugin, zita-rev1(1), in the “Master Effects” tab of the Sythesizer (View=>Synthesizer). Besides imparting realism to many piano soundfonts, reverb is an important aid in overcoming MuseScore’s simplistic pedalling. Careful adjustments to the zitz-rev1 controls also mitigate the default portato articulation of many soundfonts, resulting in smoother legato, especially in rapid passages. (See the next section for information on fixing excessive portato introduced by MuseScore.)

• Fixing the gate time

Gate time refers to when a note starts (ontime) and stops (offtime). MuseScore 2 sets the offtime for the Piano instrument a little short. While this may be useful if you want a very clean, détaché articulation throughout the whole score (think Glenn Gould), it is generally not what you want unless your music is highly contrapuntal.

To fix the shortened note length for the entire score, save the score as .mscx rather than .mscz. Open the .mscx file with a text editor and search for <Articulation> (i.e. just <Articulation>, not <Articulation name="type">). Two lines lower, you’ll see <gateTime>95</gateTime>. Change the 95 to 100, save, and quit. If you subsequently want to work on an .mscz version of the score, open the .mscx version and save it as .mscz. Alternatively, you can edit the default gateTime in the Piano section of the instruments.xml file. All subsequent piano scores will use the new default.

MuseScore v.1 allowed setting ontime and offtime as a function of Note Properties, but this capability is not present in the current release. It is to be hoped this oversight will be corrected. Controlling gate time is essential for natural, non-mechanical-sounding phrasing. At present, the only way to control it is with the Piano Roll Editor, which is implemented poorly and lacks even basic editing functions like group-selecting notes.

Setting the dynamics

Before fine-tuning a score, you need to set the overall dynamics. Musescore observes the somewhat arbitrary MIDI standard for dynamic levels, which may or may not be appropriate for your chosen soundfont. Check the volume of all dynamics in your score by right-clicking on the dynamic markings and adjusting the “Velocity” field in the Inspector. Don’t assume the velocity for a given dynamic will be the same throughout the whole score. Dynamics are relative to each other. Texture and tempo furthermore influence how they’re perceived.

The Inspector allows you to choose whether a dynamic mark or hairpin applies to the grand staff (i.e. both staves, which the Inspector calls “Part”) or an individual staff. When setting overall dynamic levels, pay attention to places where one staff or the other needs to be more prominent. Attach a dynamic marking to each staff and choose “Staff” for both in the Inspector. Make one of them invisible (the keyboard shortcut is “v”), then adjust the velocities of both until the correct balance is achieved.

Pedalling

Pedalling is often left to the discretion of the performer, but for the purposes of digital playback, the score is the performer. Complete pedalling instructions must therefore be included. Those you do not want appearing in the printable version of the score can be hidden (made invisible).

Conversely, visible pedal markings may not produce exactly the effect you want during playback. Depressing or releasing the pedal a note earlier or later than marked may achieve a better result. In such cases, use Shift+ArrowLeft/Right to attach the pedal anchors to the notes that work best, then click-drag the ends of the pedal lines to the desired visual position.

In some instances, you may find that required pedal markings for a real-world interpretation of your score don’t sound right in digital playback. Either they need to be removed entirely for playback, or changes of pedal introduced to prevent muddiness where a real performer wouldn't need them marked in the score. The solution to this situation is to hide the pedal marks needed for digital playback, then to create fake visible pedal lines that have no effect on playback. This is done by attaching a plain line from the Lines Palette to the appropriate notes on the lower staff, right-clicking on the line and editing the Line Properties. Enter <sym>keyboardPedalPed</sym> in the text field, check “End=>Hook”, and adjust the vertical placement of the text (Ped.) so it’s flush with the line. The button to the right of the text field in Line Properties calls up the formatting dialogue where vertical adjustment is set.

Adjusting note velocities

■ Melody

Dynamics and pedalling having been taken care of, you’re ready to attack your score in earnest. Just as in a live performance, ninety percent of “interpreting” a score with MuseScore involves getting the loudness (velocity) of each note right. For melodies, this means adjusting velocities to reveal phrasing and clarify rhythmic figurations. For harmonies, it means adjusting chord notes to achieve a proper balance in the vertical sonorities.

I find it’s best to work phrase-by-phrase. Begin by selecting the melody notes and increasing their velocity by at least 10. Leave the Velocity type at “Offset” (in the Inspector) since this ensures the new value is added to the prevailing dynamic. “10” is somewhat arbitrary. The amount of emphasis needed depends on many factors, including register, prevailing dynamcis, tempo, texture, and “busy-ness” of the accompaniment. Play around with the value until the melody notes stand out clearly.

Melodies don’t always live in the right hand or the top voice, so be sure to select and increase the velocity all significant melodic fragments and motifs.

If emphasizing the melody makes a passage or phrase too loud, group select all notes not in the melody and decrease their velocity rather than adjusting the settings for your dynamic markings. Your goal is to balance the planes of sound (i.e. melody and accompaniment) within dynamics you’ve already established. Fine-tuning dynamic settings should be left for a final step.

At this stage, playback of your score should make more sense musically, but most likely still sounds as if the performer is a hamfisted hack. The reason is that other than the distinction between melody and accompaniment, adjacent notes are being played at a uniform volume. A live pianist never plays adjacent notes identically unless the score demands it.

“Adjacent” means adjacent both horizontally (melodies and rhythmic figures) and vertically (triads, chords). Getting the relative velocities right for either relies on a few general principles.

■ Strong and weak beats

• Meter

Consider the meter of your score. If it’s 2/4, bars are divided into two beats, one strong and one weak. Therefore, a simple melody composed of quarter-notes would need the velocity of every second quarter reduced to produce the characteristic DAH-dah DAH-dah pulse of 2/4. 4/4 is similar in that it has a strong-weak-strong-weak arrangement. The difference is that beat 3 receives slightly less emphasis than beat 1; the two off-beats (2 and 4) generally receive approximately the same weight: DAH-dah-DUH-dah DAH-dah-DUH-dah. 3/4 usually has a strong first beat followed by two noticeably weaker beats: DAH-duh-duh DAH-duh-duh. It is this that produces the characteristic lilt of 3/4 time. 6/8 meter, like 2/4, is divided into two beats (two dotted quarters), strong-weak, but with three subdivisions of the beat that should be treated the same as 3/4, such that a regular progression of eighth-notes in 6/8 produces DAH-duh-duh-DUH-duh-duh.

• Regular subdivisions of the beat

The principle of strong and weak beats applies to subdivisions of the beat as well. Thus, two eighth-notes side-by-side in 2/4 or 4/4 are strong-weak, assuming the first falls on a beat. Three-note groupings—triplets, or three eighths in 6/8—follow the strong-weak-weak pattern, and four note groupings—four eighths or four sixteenths— should exhibit the strong-weak-medium-weak pattern of 4/4 time.

The faster the tempo, the less need there is to adjust the individual velocities of 4-note groupings. It is often enough to emphasize only the first note. The remaining notes may be set to a uniform lower velocity and still sound musically satisfactory.

• Dotted rhythms, long-short-short groupings

At moderate to fast tempi, pianists reflexively play dotted rhythms (e.g. dotted-eighth/sixteenth) strong-weak. What’s surprising about the reflex, when translated to note velocities, is how much softer the short note needs to be. Given that, in melodies, the short note frequently lands between the cracks of the accompanying figuration, it doesn’t take much volume for it to stand out. Furthermore, the short note almost never plays a significant harmonic role. It’s usually a non-chord note: passing tone, échappé, or cambiata. Therefore, don’t be afraid to reduce the velocity by quite a bit. Let your ears be your guide. A proper balance in the loudness between long and short makes dotted rhythms skip. Improper balance makes them limp along like someone with a sprained ankle.

Reversing the sense of a dotted rhythm (e.g. sixteenth/dotted-eighth) also observes the strong-weak profile, but in many cases, the velocity of the short note needs to be strongly emphasized rather than the velocity of the long note reduced. The reason is that reverse dotted rhythms usually imply an accent on the short note.

Long-short-short groupings (e.g. eighth-sixteenth-sixteenth) are similar to dotted rhythms in that the final short note usually needs to be quite soft, relatively speaking. Conversely, like reverse dotted rhythms, short-short-long (e.g. sixteenth-sixteenth-eighth) groupings usually benefit from emphasizing the first short note.

■ Hairpins (crescendi, diminuendi)

Hairpins are executed by MuseScore 2 during playback. If you put a two-bar crescendo between a note marked piano and a note marked forte, the volume rises steadily from piano to forte. I can’t be certain, but my ears tell me the algorithm for determining the change in volume is s=(d2-d1)/n, where s is the velocity step, d1 and d2 are the velocities of the dynamic markings, and n is the number of notes affected by the hairpin. The result is that the change in velocity is uniform from note to note, which sounds artificial because that is not how hairpins are executed in real life.

Overcoming the artificiality is a matter of trial and error. Many factors influence the impression of crescendo and diminuendo. There is no algorithm that can be applied to every instance. If the overall effect of the hairpin is less, or more, than expected, click on the hairpin and use the Velocity change field to in/decrease it. "0" in the field means the default behaviour described above. Any other number means that a user-set velocity change is applied progressively to the notes affected by the hairpin. Once the overall effect is to your liking, adjust the velocities of every affected note until your ears tell you the hairpin sounds natural.

■ Balancing chords

Adjusting vertical sonorities is even more time-consuming than getting melodic lines right. For any given chord, all of the notes need to be adjusted in relation each other. The texture of the chord, the voicing, the register, the prevailing dynamic, and the voice leading all play a part.

Start by getting the volume (velocity) of the principle chord note correct in relation to the rest of the musical texture. Principle chord notes are often melody notes, so if you’ve already taken care of emphasizing the melody, you can focus on the supporting harmony.

Generally, the bottom note of a chord, whether root position or an inversion, needs to have the most weight. Since lower notes on the piano resonate more than upper notes, it’s rare their velocity needs to be increased. If anything, it usually needs to be decreased slightly in order not to be too prominent. A useful trick is to click-select all the chord notes but the lowest and highest, which is probably a melody note, then uncheck Play in the Inspector. This allows you to experiment with the balance between bass and treble.

Once the bass note is correct, click-select the fifth of the chord and make it audible. Unless a chord is in second inversion, the fifth should be slightly softer than the root. Over-emphasized fifths make chords sound clunky. Experiment with the velocity of the fifth until it achieves its role as a significant supporting tone while still “singing” clearly.

The thirds of chords determine their mode, major or minor. They are also the most unstable note in a chord and need to be treated with care. Select and make audible the third of the chord and decrease its velocity (sometimes by up to 10 or more steps) until it “locks” in place with the rest of the chord.

Extensions (sevenths, ninths, etc.) should be dealt with last. If thirds give chords their mode, extensions give them their colour. Since extensions are always dissonant in relation to the base triad, they stand out on their own so, like the third, their velocity should be decreased until they fulfil their colour role without overtaking the whole chord.

Be careful of doublings. If a chord note is doubled at another octave, you have to determine which octave contributes best to the sonority of the chord. Start by giving both doublings the same volume (not necessarily the same velocity), then play around with the velocities of both until you’re satisfied with the balance. This advice applies primarily to roots and fifths, since thirds and extensions are less likely to be doubled.

Overall, open voicings are easier to deal with than closed. The reason is that the more jammed together a chord is, the greater the likelihood of conflicting overtones. Even when the tuning of a soundfont is flawless, close-voiced chords can sound out-of-tune, usually a little sharp. This is especially true of chords the lower down the keyboard you go. The guilty party is usually the third. I suspect Beethoven’s fondness for thick, close-voiced chords in the lower register of the piano stems from his not being able to hear the conflicting upper partials owing to his deafness.

Alterations of tempo

■ Rubato

Rubato does not always mean the Horowitzian extremes of pushing and pulling the tempo for exaggerated expressivity. Even the simplest piece exhibits minute changes in tempo when executed sensitively, for example the natural tendency toward relaxing the tempo at the ends of phrases, or giving important melody notes agogic accents.

The tool for introducing rubato into a score is the Time stretch parameter associated with articulations in the Inspector, not actual changes in tempo. Click-select notes whose length you wish to modify, add an articulation from the Palette, and make it invisible. It doesn’t matter which articulation you choose. I use the tenuto mark but it could as easly be a fermata.

Click-select the articulation and begin adjusting the time stretch. Use very small increments. Depending on the tempo and the duration of the note, even a 0.01 change in the middle of a phrase can be audible. At phrase ends, the natural caesura can be accomplished with a time stretch of as little as 0.1.

Rubato is largely a question of taste and judgment, so listen to your scores critically. The best way to determine where rubato is needed is to conduct your score while it’s playing. Doing this, I’m immediately disturbed when phrases barrel toward their ends instead of coming to rest, or when subsequent phrases begin without enough breathing time between, or when an important note doesn’t have time to speak properly. Singing the score helps, too.

I often find that rhythmic figures comprising two short notes leading to a longer one sound slightly uneven, for example ♪ ♬ ♪ ♬ ♪ ... The second short note seems to be rushed, despite respecting the beat. Lengthening it by a tiny amount corrects the problem. Whether or not this merely reflects my playing style is impossible to judge, but it is worth considering whenever rhythmic figures of this sort strike you as inexplicably uneven.

■ Ritardando

MuseScore does not provide a way to achieve automatic gradual changes of tempo during playback (analogous to hairpins). As with rubato, the trick is to use hidden articulations whose time stretches adjust the length of each note during the speed-up or slow-down. This is much more efficient than making a series of tempo changes, and provides finer-grained control.

Ritardandi (and accellerandi) are notoriously difficult to get right. The impression of a uniform, gradual change of tempo is partly an illusion when sensitively executed by a live performer. For this reason, simply increasing the time stretch uniformly for each note in a ritardando passage will not work. In live performance, some note groupings are played pretty much at speed. Others, depending on the length of the ritardando, are played for a while at a uniform slower tempo before slowing again. Significant notes may require agogic accents. Dynamics are also a consideration: ritardando combined with diminuendo means that the length of time each note needs to “sing” plays a role in how much time stretch it needs. The most important thing to remember is that ritardando means a slowing of the beat or pulse, not merely the slowing of individual notes.

The best way to work on ritardandi is to establish a less-than-ideal regular slowing down first. This is accomplished by click selecting all the affected notes, adding hidden articulations, and adjusting the time stretch of each note arithmetically, for example by steps of .01 (.01, .02, .03...) or .02 (.02, .04, .06...) depending on the amount of slowing down required. That done, play the passage over and over and, using your ears as your guide, tweak each individual time stretch until you’re completely satisfied you hear the ritardando the way you want. Don’t rely on some sort of regular progression of incremental time stretch changes to convince you you've achieved a realistic result.

Supplementary Hidden Staves

When setting up a piano score, it’s a good idea to include a supplementary, hidden staff. An extra grand staff isn’t usually necessary, just a single staff that uses the piano soundfont. Staves are hidden by unchecking the “Visible” checkbox in Edit=>Instruments. Note that Musescore 2 has the peculiarity that you have to close and re-open the Instruments dialogue in order to see the “Visible” checkbox the first time time you add an instrument.

The reason for a hidden staff is to spell things out literally when MuseScore’s default playback of certain musical gestures, notably ornaments, doesn’t produce the results you want. For example, you may want a mordent snapped out as 64ths rather than 32nds, or to give a pulse to a particularly long trill. In these cases, click-select the visible ornamented note and uncheck “Play” in the Inspector. Then, on the staff that will be hidden, write the ornament out in full the way you want, applying whatever velocity changes and time stretches you need. When you’re done, hide the staff. For layout purposes, MuseScore completely ignores hidden staves, so a trill over a whole note in the visible staff takes up the same space it did before you wrote the trill out in full on the supplementary staff, once the staff hidden. Caveat: Don’t make changes to your score’s layout while the supplementary staff is visible.

■ Broken Chords (arpeggiando)

A hidden, supplementary staff is essential for broken chords. MuseScore 2’s default playback of an arpeggiando is to start on the beat. Furthermore, the speed of the arpeggiando is determined by the duration of the chord to which it is attached. A broken whole-note chord is arpeggiated very slowly, while a broken eighth-note chord is arpeggiated much more rapidly.

To get the right speed, it isn’t necessary to write the arpeggiando out in full on the supplementary staff. Rather, uncheck “Play” for the whole chord in the visible staff, then copy and paste it (along with the arpeggiando marking) to the supplementary staff and make it playable there. Now all you have to do is change the duration of the chord to one that plays the arpeggiando at the speed you want, then tie it so the chord so it lasts as long as the visible score directs.

Unfortunately, getting broken chords to start before the beat does require writing the arpeggiando out in full.

Conclusion

I cannot overemphasize how much time is required to turn a beautiful MuseScore score—and the scores are indeed very beautiful—into a musically satisfactory digitial audio interpretation. It takes commitment, dedication and patience to tweak every one of the thousands of notes that may make up a score, but it’s time well spent if you share audio versions of your scores publicly.

MuseScore 2.0 - A Great Success

I was excited when MuseScore 2.0 was released a few months ago. I’ve been using the program for a couple of years to engrave scores and generate midi output for rendering into digital performances. Some persistent bugs, left unaddressed too long in the 1.x development cycle, meant waiting for 2.0 for the fixes.

In order to see how 2.0 performed, I selected two fearsomely complex piano pieces I wrote a number of years ago. My goal was to see if I could engrave them exactly as notated in the manuscripts, then realize satisfactory audio performances directly from the scores.

The two pieces are musical reflections on the first and second hexagrams of the I Ching (The Book of Changes). The scores can be viewed as PDFs at

    http://www.schaffter.ca/pdf/Ch’ien.pdf
    http://www.schaffter.ca/pdf/Kun.pdf

or on YouTube (along with audio) at

    Ch’ien:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MMXN5VdAnY
    Kun:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEWPldWLbLs

Overall, I have to say I am very pleased with 2.0. An immediately obvious improvement is the implementation of fully-functional constrained mouse moves and a “snap to grid” option. What a timesaver. No more firing up a screen ruler and slip-sliding things around until they line up. But the best thing about 2.0 is the new “Inspector,” a pane showing nearly every configurable value for a selected object. My test scores needed many, many tweaks (which were expected because of the scores’ complexity). The Inspector made it much easier to effect the changes than the former note-by-note, right-click method implemented in 1.x.

Ch’ien and Kun posed both notational and playback challenges. Playback being a sensitive point with the developers (the party line, oft-repeated, is “MuseScore is a music notation program”), I’ll write about it in another article.

The main notational challenges presented to MuseScore by Ch’ien and Kun were:

 1. a piano grand staff comprised of four staves instead of the usual two
 2. the use of transposing clefs (8va and 8va bassa)
 3. ottava lines
 4. chords joined by the stem across multiple staves
 5. cross-staff beaming
 6. continuing beams over system breaks
 7. arpeggiandi across staves
 8. open-ended ties across bar lines
 9. long slurs with awkward profiles, sometimes spanning staves
10. additive rhythms, meaning no time signature and bars of significantly differing lengths
11. unusual tuplets, e.g. 5-64ths, with brackets
12. multiple grace notes
13. accidentals that apply only to the notes they precede
14. metronome markings given in 16th notes
15. span lines, e.g. Ritardando.....
16. extensive dynamic markings
17. precise pedaling instructions
18. text instructions requiring more than one line

MuseScore 2.0 rose to every challenge, as the finished scores show. Both are perfect in that every item appears exactly the way I want, where I want it. The overall spacing, layout and justification are excellent, as is the design of the musical symbols and notes. In terms of the finished score, MuseScore 2.0 is easily the best WYSIWYG music notation software out there. With continued development, it stands a very good chance of becoming a killer app, as the GIMP is to graphics, or VLC is to media players.

I generally judge the usefulness of a WYSIWYG program by whether it ever leaves users stuck with something they don’t like. A well-designed and implemented program allows for overriding every default, or, at the very least, for coming up with creative ways to improve the undesirable or achieve the unusual using the program’s native tools.

MuseScore is exceptionally well designed in this regard. A good example occurs on pages 11 and 12 of the Ch'ien score, where I needed beams with different values (8th and 16th) in several voices to continue over the system break. MuseScore doesn’t handle this requirement (it’s very rare), and it’s tricky to “fake”, but by hiding various beams/flags and manually drawing lines of the correct thickness and positioning them over the notes, I was able to achieve the effect.

I rank MuseScore’s implementation of “hiding” (making graphical elements invisible) amongst its best-implemented features. The developers have observed the principle of orthogonality, such that one can hide, with respect to any note, the accidental, the notehead, the dot, the stem, the flag and the beam separately. Most users will never need such extreme separability, so kudos to the developers for providing it. Best of all, hiding can be toggled with a simple keyboard shortcut, the letter “v”, and toggling the hiding/showing of all invisibles at once can be mapped in Preferences by the user.

Now, to the specifics.

Items 1-3: I had no problems setting up the four-staff grand staff. Furthermore, on playback, the transposing clefs transposed as expected, as did the ottava lines.

Items 4-6: Stretching stems across staves was accomplished easily by hiding note-flags and beams (if any) and extending the stem from one staff to meet the stem on another.

Cross-staff beaming was straightforward and reliable. A missing feature was the ability to set the beams horizontally automatically; where slanted beams looked awkward, I had to adjust them manually. This required firing up a screen ruler since the beam handles do not snap to the page grid, which would have significantly eased the operation.

The need for extending beams across system breaks is a rarity, and MuseScore doesn’t implement it. I had to get creative to achieve the effect, but MuseScore provided the tools. As mentioned above, pages 10 and 11 of Ch’ien show the results, which are flawless.

Item 7: Arpeggiando signs can easily be dragged to cross staves, however getting the desired playback is fussy. I’ll address the issue in my article on MuseScore playback.

Item 8: Open-ended ties aren’t common, so I expected setting them up to be finicky. It was, but not unnecessarily. I made ties to invisible notes or chords at the start of the next bar, then adjusted the starting position and length of the ties so they curved just over the barline. It’s another good example, like extended beaming, of MuseScore meeting my “never leave the user stuck” criterion.

Item 9: Slurs. They’re amazingly well implemented. Even long slurs spanning multiple staves exhibit elegance and grace. Rare were places I had to make adjustments. The only place where MuseScore fell down was when slurring from a stem-down to stem-up note; by convention, the end of the slur should go clearly into the stem of the stem-up note, not into or close to the top of the stem, which is how they presently appear.

Item 10: I expected the additive rhythms to give MuseScore the most trouble, but I was wrong. Calling up the Measure Properties dialogue in any bar let me specify the number of beats I needed, even oddities like 27/32. Many music notation programs fall down on this issue, so a big thanks to the MuseScore developers for getting it right.

Item 11: The creation of tuplets isn’t exactly intuitive, but it’s simple to do once you RTFM. MuseScore lets you specify whether you want the tuplet bracketed, which is nice because I often do, but like cross-staff beams, it isn’t possible to have the brackets horizontal by default, nor to get the handles to snap to the page grid.

Item 12: Multiple grace notes, no problem.

Item 13: Having accidentals apply only to the notes they precede made note entry painstaking, tedious, and prone to error. Because I intended to generate playback from the scores, it was necessary to add an accidental from the palette to every note needing to be raised or flattened. Furthermore, accidental-ed notes had to have their accidentals cancelled with hidden natural signs. The hidden natural signs frequently interfered with the correct positioning of visible accidentals, particularly staggered accidentals (which, under more usual circumstances, MuseScore handles intelligently). It is fortunate that MuseScore allows shifting the position of accidentals, since it didn’t leave me “stuck”, but the amount of work required to get them right was staggering. Definitely not for the faint of heart.

Given the number of scores written in the past hundred years with the “accidentals apply only to...” requirement, the MuseScore developers need to give the matter some thought. I propose a special note-entry mode where Arrow-Up doesn’t raise a note by a semitone, but rather always adds a sharp, with the same behaviour for Arrow-Down and flats. (This would also help overcome MuseScore’s hate-on for E-sharp/B-sharp and F-flat/C-flat.) All notes without an accidental would, in this mode, be treated as naturals upon playback.

Item 14: Metronome markings using the 16th note were possible, but the text field is buggy. When adding tempi markings to Kun, the default note value appeared as a dotted-quarter with no stem. Wiping it out from immediately left of the equals sign took three presses of the Backspace key—and still didn’t wipe out the dot! Also, I dislike the default “lowered and smaller” notehead style used for tempo markings, so I had to adjust the size after entering my 16th note. It would be nice if this were a settable default.

There was a playback issue, too. Although the Inspector has a “Follow text” option for tempo markings, it doesn’t. The text, “<16th-note> = 114”, unambiguously means the unit for metronome beats is the 16th, and there should be of 114 of them per minute. Playback, however, multiplied the speed by 4, indicating it was using a quarter-note as the beat despite text that said “use a sixteenth”. The solution was to uncheck “Follow text” and enter a BPM one-quarter the desired tempo. Easy enough, but “Follow text” should, to my way of thinking, mean “follow text”. If it means something else, perhaps it should be labelled differently.

That said, the idea, if not the implementation, is a great addition to MuseScore.

Item 15: Span lines were a bit of a nuisance. For example, a simple ritardando over two bars required: a) dragging a solid line from the palette to the note where I wanted it to begin; b) changing the line to a dashed line (in the Inspector); c) right-clicking the line to call up the Line Properties dialogue; d) entering “Rit.” in the text box; e) adjusting the formatting of the type and its placement relative to the line (placement defaults to somewhere in the middle of the text’s x-height); f) dragging the rightmost point of the line to the desired location. Do that often enough, and you start to get irritated.

I hope the developers will consider adding a few of the most common span lines to the palette: Rit., Accelerando, Cres., Dim., and the like. Alternatively, a method for creating one’s own span lines in the Master Palette, similar to the way one can create new time signatures, would be just as welcome.

Item 16: Adding dynamics to a score (p, mf, fff...) is a no-brainer, however there is a caveat when it comes to moving them around after they’ve been added. If you mouse-drag an already-placed dynamic too far, you risk decoupling it from the note and/or staff to which it was attached and having it attach to another. This has no effect on the printed score other than repositioning the dynamic to the desired visual location, but it does affect playback. The only reliable way to prevent a dynamic from anchoring to a different note while repositioning it is to use the Inspector to set the new horizontal and vertical offset.

Hairpins (crescendo, diminuendo) are a pain in the neck if you have need a lot of them. In theory, adding them is easy: click the notes where you want the hairpin to start and end, then hit the “<” or “>” key. Unfortunately, the default starting point aligns with any accidentals that precede the starting note, and the default endpoint is always one note further to the right than the one you selected. The left-hand problem is a bad design choice; the right-hand problem is a bug. Both meant a lot of manual tweaking.

Item 17: There is no way to add a pedal line between two selected notes (i.e. a range of notes). A pedal line must be dragged from the palette to the desired starting note, whence, by unchangeable default, it runs the remainder of the length of the bar. Pedal changes within the bar require moving the anchor of the “pedal up” mark back to the correct position one note at a time. As scores increase in length and complexity, the amount of time it takes to move backward just one note increases, sometimes by up to one second on my AMD dual-core system. The annoyance of having to move the pedal-up point backward for every single pedal change within a bar, plus the sluggishness of the operation, is enough to make a sane person go ballistic.

Though it pains me to say so, MuseScore gets a failing mark when it comes to pedaling, and I seriously hope the developers change their tune on the subject, which presently runs: The need for precise pedaling is rare (since when?), “to the end of the bar” is a sensible default length (it’s not; “to the next major beat” is), and use simile to avoid too many pedal marks, which goes against the advice of most style guides.

Item 18: MuseScore doesn’t include linespacing in its text formatting controls, which means that if you need to insert multi-line text instructions, you’re stuck with the linespacing MuseScore gives you, which is often too loose. I hope this oversight, present in 1.x as well, gets corrected.

Miscellaneous

Randomly and inexplicably, but routinely, the little arrows used to increment or decrement fields in the Inspector (e.g. the horizontal offset) begin to react twice to a single mouse click. Thus, if a click is supposed to increment by .50sp, it increments by 1.00sp instead. Once the behaviour starts, it persists throughout the session.

Anchor points for pedaling are based on the staff to which the pedal line is attached rather than to the whole system (grand staff). This means, for example, that if you have a full measure rest in the bass staff, pedal lines have to be attached to the treble staff for their anchors to be positioned correctly. Afterwards, the line has to be dragged to the proper position beneath the bass staff.

Scores exported to PDF look ghastly, at least when viewed in Okular, which is one of the most common PDF viewers on Linux systems. I haven’t seen such jaggedness in diagonal lines and curves since the early days of Mario Bros. A workaround is to export the score to PNG, which produces a separate .png file for each page. Convert each of the .png files to .pdf, then concatenate them into a single file.

MuseScore’s text-formatting is extremely rudimentary. Typographically satisfactory title pages with items like performance instructions and instrumentation are next to impossible. I typeset mine separately and join them to the PDF version of the score.

Around page 20 of the Kun score, I wanted to respell a couple of pitches. I selected the chords in question and hit Respell. From where I was in the score, the result looked like what I wanted so I saved and quit. Imagine my dismay, on re-opening the file, to discover that the entire score had been respelled! I lost a couple of days fixing everything. I’ll know better in the future, but since I’m certain not to be the only person who hasn’t read the manual before using the Respell function (which specifies that Respell acts on the whole score), it would be a good idea for MuseScore to issue a warning before performing the operation.

Finally, my Ch’ien score reveals a puzzling bug in MuseScore. Every time I save and re-open the file, it’s corrupted. Specifically, several pages worth of pedal markings are significantly out of place. The problem is not with the score itself, since before saving it, it renders perfectly on the screen. (I know, I re-entered the pedal marks dozens of times.) I’m not sure how MuseScore can render a file perfectly when it’s open (pre-save/close), but mangle it upon re-opening. Potentially a serious bug, even though, at present, no one else seems to have encountered it, and only Ch’ien is affected.

Summary

While the final version of my two scores shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that MuseScore 2.0 allows one to create beautiful scores to exacting standards, it doesn’t always do so as efficiently as I believe it could. On the basis of my “never stuck” criterion, I give MuseScore 2.0 a solid 10/10, but issues with dynamics, hairpins and pedaling lower the mark to 8. The developers are, however, marvellously responsive to bug reports, suggestions and feature requests, so I expect that MuseScore will soon reach 10/10 in all areas concerning the creation of printable musical scores.

2015 Dalton Camp Award submission

The following is an essay I submitted to the Friends of the CBC’s 2015 Dalton Camp Award. The contest subject was “The link between the media and democracy in Canada.” With a $10,000CAD prize, anyone in their right mind would have written an essay currying the favour of the Friends and the judges by re-hashing the role of the Fourth Estate and supporting the CBC to the hilt.

I am not in my right mind. For decades, the CBC has been out-of-touch with all but middle-class and upper Canadians. Its once-proud tradition of journalism–remember The Fifth Estate breaking Brian Mulroney’s Airbus kickback scandal?– has been drowned out by Pastor Mansbridge of The National nightly intoning the government-in-power’s party line. Intellectually, it has been so dumbed down that when I review, say, documentaries by Glenn Gould on YouTube, documentaries made in the ’60s and ’70s, I am dismayed to realize that in 2015, a man such as Gould would never be given free rein to occupy the airwaves with programs as profound as The Idea of the North or as erudite as An Art of the Fugue.

The notion that the CBC is still what it was in its glory days persists among liberal, educated Canadians. Many assert with pride (and a certain distasteful elistism) that they only listen to CBC–particularly the news– believing it to be the voice of all Canadians, linking rich and poor, urban and rural, educated and unschooled. One can reasonably assume that the Friends, and the Dalton Camp Award judges, are of this opinion. If my goal had been to make a stab at the $10,000, dispelling this persistent myth about present-day CBC and implicating it in the demise of democracy in Canada would clearly not have been the way to go about it.

Yet that is precisely what I did. Don’t get me wrong: I loved CBC radio when I was growing up. I would not be who I am today–intellectually, culturally, or politically–were it not for Gilmour’s Albums, Off the Record, Eclectic Circus, The World at Six, Morningside, Ideas, The Royal Canadian Air Farce (radio version) or Glenn Gould’s breathtakingly articulate documentaries. Through the medium of the CBC, I came to understand what Trudeau meant by a “just society”, and shared the quiet, assured pride Canadians felt about being part in it.

I submitted my essay as a sort of test to see whether those who believe the CBC is still what it was were open-minded, capable of accepting reasoned criticism, and unafraid to acknowledge that Canada, no longer a functioning democracy, became that way in part through a failure of the Fourth Estate. I suspected not, which doesn’t mean I didn’t hope to be proven wrong by winning.

Not having won proves nothing, of course, though I can’t help noticing that the winning essay stays well within the lines and steers clear of the fact that the link between the media and democracy in Canada is meaningful only if we have a democracy, which, as of September 12 2014, we unequivocally do not. The winning essay is well written and researched, though, and deserves a read (The Freedom to Jest: Protecting Our Democratic Right to Parody and Satire).

The text of my essay as presented here is stripped of footnotes to aid readability. If you’d like to read the text intact, as submitted, a typeset copy in PDF format is available on my website here.

Democracy: Error 404

Essay submitted to the 2015 Dalton Camp Award competition

It’s Hallowe’en night, and Jack-o-lanterns are flickering on the street outside my window in Vanier, Ontario. The usual hookers have been chased from the sidewalk by trick-or-treaters dressed in Dollar Store costumes.

Never heard of Vanier? It’s the poor part of Ottawa, the one you don’t see on The National. A large portion of its residents are on social assistance. Alcoholism is rampant, as is crack use, and prostitution. Most of the housing is rental, with absentee landlords who collect tax credits for three years then flip the properties.

Vanier is just a stone’s throw from Parliament Hill, but politics is rarely a topic of conversation here. Residents of Vanier know it doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always wins. Increasingly, better-off Canadians are feeling the same way. I recently saw a bumper sticker on an SUV loaded with kids and hockey gear: If voting could change anything, it wouldn’t be legal.

Democracy exists to safeguard against tyranny, a situation that exists when too few hands hold too much power. Put another way, democracy is founded on the principle that all who are drawn to power will abuse it.

The distinguishing feature of democracy is that sovereign power rests in the hands of the governed. The people, in other words. Sovereignty, as defined by the 1648 treaties of Osnabrück and Münster–collectively, “The Peace of Westphalia”–entails self-governance, the acknowledged right of a country to enact legislation free of supranational interference.

Yet on September 12, 2014, the Canadian government, headed by a duly-elected Prime Minister, ratified a trade agreement with China that gives state-backed Chinese corporations the right to sue Canada when legislation passed at any level of government interferes with their profits.

This is not the first such agreement, called a FIPA (Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement), that Canada has signed. At last count, there are twenty-eight. Any one of them, arguably, erodes the sovereignty of Canadian democracy. What is different about the one with China is that when China isn’t happy with our legislation, they can sue us in camera. That means in secret, behind closed doors. More frightening, we, the the citizens of Canada, won’t even know when China institutes proceedings against us. Depending on how heavily China invests in Canada, resource management, healthcare, education, banking, and environmental and human rights legislation are no longer under our control.

It’s time to face an unpalatable truth: we no longer have a democracy in Canada, not by any definition of the word. Sovereign power does not rest uniquely with her peoples. The China-Canada FIPA forfeited that right.

How did we come to this? How did a once admired and respected nation allow itself to become the servant of a master other than its citizens? A master, moreover, with an atrocious record of human rights violations and environmental spoilage? More important, how is it most Canadians were blindsided by our loss of sovereignty?

The link between the media and democracy is supposed to be that democracy requires informed citizens, and the media informs them. Where, then, was the media in the period between the signing of FIPA and its ratification two years later? How is it so few Canadians even knew of its existence?

It is easy to point a finger at government. From the 2012 signing in Vladivostock to the press-release announcement of its ratification in 2014, the government did its best to stifle debate and keep FIPA out of the public eye. Green Party leader Elizabeth May’s blistering sixty-second briefing to the Speaker of the House on October 24 2012 was a lone cry in the wind.

But FIPA was a matter of public record after it was tabled in Parliament. Since it posed a serious threat to Canadian sovereignty, the national media should have been on it like white on rice. Yet despite mounting grassroots opposition, critiques by acknowledged experts, and petitions signed by tens of thousands of Canadians, the media remained virtually silent. The day of ratification, it ranked lower on The National than the shenanigans of Toronto mayor, Rob Ford, as the following Twitter posts remind us:

L. Lea @YukonGale:
  “The National is half over and FIPA hasn’t yet been mentioned.”

The National @CBCTheNational:
  “Thanks for your tweet. Mentioned at the 20 minute mark in the program.”

L. Lea @YukonGale:
  “Sorry, I must have blinked. You don’t think that was more pertinent to the country than the Ford story?”

One could be forgiven for suspecting the CBC, a Crown corporation supposedly at arm’s length from the government, was in this case anything but. However, the failure of mainstream media to serve its role in Canadian democracy runs deeper than the seemingly complicit silence over FIPA.

The link between democracy and the media depends upon a necessary fiction, that of journalistic impartiality. We expect significant news items to be reported accurately and in an unbiased manner. The media, however, cannot do this. The very manner in which it reports the news shapes public opinion. Which stories are considered newsworthy, how many seconds or column inches they receive, and how stories are prioritized are powerful tools for manipulating public perception.

Add to this the problem of ownership concentration in Canadian media, and the untenability of the fiction becomes obvious. One wonders how anyone was ever gulled by it. Whoever holds the purse strings to the media controls the flow of information to the public. This is as true of the CBC–say it isn’t so!–as it is of CTV (a subsidiary of BCE, the parent company of Bell Canada), Sun Media (a subsidiary of Québécor) or Postmedia (owner of all the former Canwest/Global publishing properties). Ownership concentration has been business as usual in the Canadian media for over a hundred years. In his heyday, convicted fraudster Conrad Black owned 59 Canadian dailies (55% of the market), most of which were acquired from Southam Inc., a newspaper empire founded in 1904.

The most troubling weakness in the link between the media and democracy in Canada is manifested at election time. The fault is not entirely the media’s. Blame lies in a flaw that’s woven into in our electoral system: the Prime Minister is chosen by default. The leader of the party with the greatest number of seats in Parliament becomes, de facto, the head of government, putting Canadians in the position of casting a one-size-fits-all ballot for their local MP, the party they would like to hold majority in Parliament, and the leader of the nation.

Our system of representational democracy is supposed to reflect a combined, upward expression of the will of Canadians. Ideally, we vote for the candidate whom we believe will best represent our riding’s interests in Parliament. Typically, this candidate is aligned with a political party that embraces a particular ideology, such that the sum total of party representation in Parliament represents the national political zeitgeist. The leader of the party with the majority of seats becomes Prime Minister, not because s/he was elected to the position, but because s/he was chosen by party members as the embodiment of the virtues and aspirations for Canada the party espouses.

During elections, the media, both regional and national, unfailingly focus on partisan politics. Intentionally or not, they paint a simplistic, top-down view of the electoral process, one that trivializes voting for best representation, encouraging, instead, placing bets on a winner. Election coverage resembles Queen’s Plate day at Woodbine. The field is reduced to two front runners and a long shot, usually the NDP. The breeding, background, and win rate of party leaders are trotted out like racing forms. Weaknesses are attacked with the zeal of piranhas flaying a hapless cow. Party standings in the polls–the odds–are reported daily.

This last is particularly destructive because it fosters strategic voting. A strategic vote–a vote against something–is no vote at all. It is a response to feeling backed into a corner, compelled to use one’s ballot to prevent an outcome rather than pro-actively support one. This kind of binary choice–back the winner or skew the race–isn’t democracy, it’s playing the odds, and calls into doubt the authenticity of election results. Combined with gerrymandering and a lack of transparent mechanisms for investigating electoral irregularities, it is theoretically possible for Canadians to elect a Prime Minister known to be disdainful of democracy and seem to grant him a majority in Parliament despite his party having less than forty percent of the popular vote.

Well, perhaps not so theoretically.

The media’s role in democracy does not end with elections, though all too often it does. Press releases and wire-service stories stand in for real journalism. Facts are reported without taking into account that reporting is not just about facts, but the dynamic interplay between them. Informed analysis is required to make news stories meaningful and set them in context. Such analysis is generally missing from the daily news reports Canadians rely on. Even when it is not, the analysis is often perfunctory, and significant stories are allowed to die afterwards. CBC radio, for example, broadcast a discussion between treaty expert Gus Van Harten and David Fung of the Canada-China Business Council shortly after the signing of FIPA in 2012. It raised alarms about the constitutionality of FIPA and its damaging impact on Canadian sovereignty, but there the story stopped. Despite demands for Parliamentary debate, despite tens of thousands of petition signatures, despite Trade Minister Ed Fast’s assertion in May 2014 that only “technicalities” stood in the way of final ratification, scarcely a peep was heard about FIPA on the CBC, other than a blip or two occasioned by the Hupacasath judicial challenge–Ed Fast’s technicalities.

“Much has been written over the past two years about the impact the Canada-China FIPA,” says The Council of Canadians blog of September 12, 2014, but if it has, it certainly hasn’t been in the mainstream media. A Google search for news items about FIPA between January 2013, four months after the original signing, and September 2014, the date of ratification, turns up practically nothing originating from Canadian news sources. My downstairs neighbour, a school teacher who regularly turns to the CBC for news, was completely unaware of FIPA’s damaging provisions, let alone that only the Green Party had denounced it in Parliament, called the government to task, demanded debate, and stood up for the sovereignty of Canada.

“Media” in the 21st century entails more than the traditional, gated outlets of print and broadcast. Social media and the Internet provide a free alternative for disseminating information and fostering debate. Valiant efforts were made by bloggers, the Green Party of Canada, Leadnow.ca, The Council of Canadians and other advocacy groups to keep FIPA foremost in the minds of Canadians, but to what effect? The deal was ratified. One of two conclusions that may be drawn from this. Either social media and the Internet are not yet the effective tools for democracy they promised to be two decades ago, or the government is contemptuous of democracy and unconcerned with the will of the Canadian people. The latter seems more likely. An Ipsos Reid survey conducted for The Vancouver Sun in December, 2012, revealed that 59% of Canadians opposed a free-trade deal with China, 68% wanted the Conservative government to block the sale of Canadian firms to foreign investors, and 74% felt the governing Tories should stop acquisitions made by foreign, state-owned enterprises.

Even with the traditional media reporting these findings, even with the free and open Internet striving to keep Canadians informed, even with Elizabeth May’s clarion calls in Parliament a matter of public record on YouTube, the present Conservative government, led by Stephen Harper, signed away the sovereignty of the Canadian people.

The link between democracy and the media in Canada, however imperfect, is now irrelevant. For there to be a link, there must be a democracy. But like a browser URL you click on that results in “Error 404: Page not found”, when I click “Canada” this Hallowe’en night in Vanier, up pops “Error 404: Democracy not found”.

2015: The Year Everything Breaks

Very probably I shouldn’t write this post. I’m not a psychic. I rarely make predictions about anything. Experience has taught me just how bad I am at it. But I have a feeling 2015 will be the year everything breaks, and I want to make sure the feeling is on record. I hope I’m wrong. Then again, perhaps not. The way the world is going, change will only follow on collapse. My intuition may just be that everything is going to change.

The world is already broken, of course. It’s hardly news. Capitalism is imploding. Whole countries teeter on the brink of bankruptcy. The sleeping giant, Russia, is stirring again. China has abandoned its Middle Kingdom insularity and seeks to dominate the world economic stage. Much of Africa is now a post-colonial cesspool, ravaged by AIDS, Ebola, and genocide. The populations of Central and South America live in fear of kidnapping, torture, and murder. The citizens of Britain can’t walk to the corner store without being tracked by CCTV cameras. Totalitarian governments in Southeast Asia are courted for child labour. America is ruled by a handful of elites who together hold more wealth than 99% of the rest of its population. The Middle-East is a killing field for warring fundamentalists and oil-dependent foreign interests. Sovereignty is dead in many countries, with legislative power handed over to trans-global corporations or the World Bank. Everywhere, the very rich are getting very richer while the very poor sink deeper into hunger, thirst, disease, and desperation.

Our functional vocabularies have shrunk to Newspeak size. Memory Holes are growing, and Big Lies pass for journalism. Liberal education, once a virtue, is dismissed, while greed, a vice, is fervently promoted. Debate on almost anything is now impossible. Illiterate opinions pass for arguments, and futile online rants replace the rhetoric of discourse.

Advertising has become the propaganda tool for a new corporate order. Citizens already crushed by debt are pressured into purchasing on credit just to bolster “The Economy,” a tool for prosperity that’s turned into an overseer’s whip.

Sexual liberation, so desperately needed to cast off the yoke of Victorian morality, has devolved into obligatory hedonism. Feminism has been cynically corrupted by the entertainment media. The liberated woman now is All About That Bass, with “...that boom boom that all the boys chase” and “All the right junk in all the right places.” Racism and homophobia are as rampant as they ever were.

Anomie and disempowerment afflict the globe. The Internet, which in its infancy we thought would usher in a golden age, is cancerous with narcissistic social media. Smart phones fool people into thinking they’re connected with the world, while addiction to the tiny digital displays cuts off the opportunity for real interaction. They and their bigger brothers, tablets, are like crack, a drug whose high, apparently, consists of simply craving more.

Non-medicinal use of psychotropic drugs is pandemic. Krokodil, a brew of match-tips, gasoline, and codeine that devours the body from inside, has left its native Russia and is popping up in North America and Western Europe. Alcohol continues to enjoy most-favoured status despite millenia of family breakdown, ruined lives, and violence, while marijuana, peaceable and medically useful, still earns its sellers and consumers prison terms.

The world is undergoing climate change, but rather than preparing for it, right-wing PR think-tanks and environmentalists shout insults at each other, neither group acknowledging that whether God or Man’s to blame, the process has begun and needs a global strategy to deal with the consequences.

Video games and CGI have saturated an entire generation with hyper-real images of brutality unknown as entertainment since Caligula and Commodus. In real life, students slaughter classmates, fathers massacre their wives and children, young men with an axe to grind spray theatres and restaurants and shopping malls with automatic weapons.

The Earth is being raped for resources a fool can see won’t last. Ecosystems vital to the planet’s health are being destroyed for short-term profit. Monsanto manufactures costly seed whose fruit is barren so that farmers can’t replant and have to buy new seed each year. Biotech unleashes GMOs into the wild with no regard for consequences. Fresh water, once abundant and the property of all, is dwindling; profiteers are scrambling to make it a commodity, like gold.

If you’ve read this far, you might be wondering what’s left to break if 2015 is the year everything breaks. I suspect what my intuition is telling me is that the cracks in the facade are widening, the lies are getting more transparent, the fictions that allow us to ignore the truth are stretched to snapping.

The source of nearly all our present woes is greed, and the wealthy’s mania for power. Global revolution, impossible before the Internet, may be the only way to stop them. I’m no fan of revolutions. They’re bloody, innocents die, and the inevitable counter-revolutions often leave things in a worse state than before. Alternatively—and this is what I believe—the whole stochastic house of cards we call the global economy is about to tumble down, with cataclysmic impact on all but a very few, self-sufficient nations. The mighty American Empire will likely be the hardest hit, given the obscene disparity between the numbers of its rich and poor.

Let’s hope my intuition is as bad as usual.