Environments for computer-aided composition (CAC for short), allowing generation and transformation of symbolic musical data, are usually counterposed to real-time environments or sequencers. The counterposition is deeply methodological: in traditional CAC environments interface changes have no effect until a certain ‘refresh’operation is performed, whereas real-time environments immediately react to user input. We shall present in this article a library for Max, named bach: automatic composer’s helper, which adds highly refined capabilities for musical notation and symbolic processing to a typically real-time environment, in order to recompose the fracture between computer-aided composition and the real-time world.