midi perl library broken under perl v5.6.1?

Hi, folks!  

something, somewhere went ker-snap, and suddenly none of my several
dozen perl-midi scripts work.  I think perhaps a new version of perl
was installed on my unix machine by the sysadmins?  anyway, we're up
to version v5.6.1  and this is the error message I get when I run:

'&make_opus($\@)' is not a valid variable name under strict vars at
MIDI/Simple.
pm line 6
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at MIDI/Simple.pm line 11.
Compilation failed in require at ./wang.pl line 5.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at ./wang.pl line 5.

-N