Lilly Pulitzer

She still lives in her "Jungle" in Palm Beach, enjoying time spent with her 7 grandchildren, her extended family of friends, and consulting with the Lilly Company on new product lines and designs. For more on this subject, see this discussion on the Max/MSP mailing list. Lilly has also published two successful desk calendar books. Many other artists use Max/MSP/Jitter, but prefer not to mention it. Recently, she published several coffee table books with author Jay Mulvaney about the history of Lilly fashion and her company, along with lifestyle cues and recipes. With the increased integration of laptop computers into live music performance (in electronic music and elsewhere), Max/MSP and Max/Jitter have received quite a bit of attention as the development environment of choice for those serious about laptop music / laptop video performance. Today, the company maintains 77 Lilly Pulitzer boutiques, several company-owned retail stores, and sells in major department stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bloomingdales. In addition, Max can be used to author audio plugin software for major audio production systems.

The company also produces Lilly bedding, mens clothing, maternity clothes, jewelry, and accessories. Max documents (called patchers) can be bundled into standalone applications and distributed free or sold commercially. Good sales have inspired branching out into other product lines. A large number of people use Max, even if they aren't aware of it. Thus, it came as a surprise to the fashion world when in January 1993 Lilly Pulitzer allowed her line to be revived; Lilly is not involved in the day administration of the company, but she maintains a creative consultant roll, approving new designs, fabrics, and collections. Additionally, the real-time image processing capability of Max also makes it the first MUSIC-N program capable of doing other things than music. In 1984, however, Lilly retired so as to spend time with her grandchildren, and closed down her entire clothing operation. Max is named for Max Mathews, and can be considered a descendant of MUSIC, though its graphical nature disguises that fact.

Arguably, Lilly Pulitzer's clothing was at the height of its original popularity in the early 1980s. Apple has a very similar program called Quartz Composer focused on graphical compositions. In 1980, Lisa Birnbach's bestselling tongue-in-cheek "guide" The Official Preppy Handbook featured a golf skirt and "Lilly beach dress" as must-have items for "preppy" women. Reaktor is generally considered easier to use and learn than Max, albeit less powerful. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Lilly's bright, colorful, well-made clothes were very popular and continued to be high-prized items. Native Instruments markets a similar software called Reaktor. Sadly, Enrique passed away from cancer in 1993 just as the fashion label was revived. Puckette himself released an entirely re-designed program in the mid-1990s called Pd ("pure data", alternately "public domain"), which has a number of fundamental differences from the IRCAM original.

Lilly continued to enjoy Palm Beach life, watching her children grow up and seeing her grand children grow too. A later version of the program was developed in Java (jMax) and is open-source. Although she legally changed her name to "Lillian McKim Rousseau", her clothing company continued to operate under the "Lilly Pulitzer" label with amazing success. IRCAM developed and maintained a concurrent version of Max for the NeXT (and later SGI and Linux), called Max/FTS (FTS standing for "Faster Than Sound", and being analogous to a forerunner to MSP enhanced by a hardware DSP board on the computer). She married Enrique Rousseau shortly thereafter. In addition, a number of sibling and Max-like programs exist. In 1969, Lilly and Peter were divorced. A second major package called Jitter was released in 2003, adding real-time video, 3-D, and matrix processing capability to the software.

Lilly's shift dresses suddenly became a fashion sensation. as a "control" language using MIDI or some other protocol). Soon, however, she was selling more dresses than juice, so she decided to stop selling juice and instead focus on designing and selling what had become known as her "Lillys." Jackie Kennedy, then the First Lady, who Lilly knew from Miss Porter's, was one of the first celebrities to sport Lilly's shift dress, and was featured in Life Magazine wearing one. Called MSP, this "add-on" package for Max allowed for the manipulation of digital audio signals in real-time, allowing users to create their own synthesizers and effects processors (Max had previously been designed to interface with hardware synthesizers, samplers, etc. Lilly quickly found that customers loved her dress, and so she had her dressmaker produce more in order to sell at her juice stand. Max has a number of extensions and incarnations; most notably, a set of audio extensions to the software appeared in 1997. Lilly loved the dress that was produced for her, and it would later become her "Classic Shift Dress.". The current commercial version of Max has been distributed by Zicarelli's company, Cycling'74, since 1999.

Seeking to camouflage the juice stains, Lilly asked her dressmaker to design a sleeveless shift dress made of bright, colorful printed cotton. In the early 1990s a commercial version of the program (developed and extended by David Zicarelli) was released by Opcode Systems. In the course of working at the juice stand, Lilly found that squeezing juice made a mess of her clothes. Max was originally written by Miller Puckette at IRCAM in the 1980s to give composers access to an authoring system for interactive computer music. Peter owned several Florida citrus groves, and with produce from the groves Lilly opened a juice stand on Via Mizner, just off Worth Avenue in Palm Beach. . Together, they settled in Palm Beach, Florida, where they lived opulently. Because of its extensible design and graphical interface (which in a novel way represents the program structure and the GUI as presented to the user simultaneously), Max is widely regarded as the lingua franca for developing interactive music performance software.

Shortly after graduating, she eloped with Peter Pulitzer, the grandson of publisher Joseph Pulitzer. As a result, Max has a large userbase of programmers not affiliated with Cycling'74 who enhance the software with commercial and non-commercial extensions to the program. In 1949, she graduated from Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut. An API allows third-party development of new routines (called "external objects"). Pulitzer was born Lillian McKim to a socialite family in Roslyn, New York, in 1931; Lilly was her nickname among her friends. The Max program itself is highly modular, with most routines existing in the form of shared libraries. 1931, Roslyn, New York -) is a socialite and prominent fashion designer. It has been used for over fifteen years by composers, performers, software designers, researchers and artists interested in creating interactive software.

Lilly Pulitzer (b. Max is a graphical development environment for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software company Cycling'74. Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead. Pauline Oliveros. Luke DuBois / The Freight Elevator Quartet.

R. Jamie Lidell. Kevin Blechdom. Leafcutter John.

Kit Clayton. Monolake. Autechre.