LilyPond talks earlier this year at IRCAM and Musikhochschule Stuttgart
From:
Trevor Bača
Subject:
LilyPond talks earlier this year at IRCAM and Musikhochschule Stuttgart
Date:
Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:25:40 -0400
Hi all,
I wanted to take a minute to provide feedback on two
LilyPond-oriented presentations I was able to make earlier this year.
This has been a busy year and so I've been largely absent from the
-user and -devel lists for some time now (though usually catching up on
the weekends). So early apologies for delayed feedback, since the
presentations date from February and April.
Incidentally, this mail loosely follows the format of a thread here ...
... from an even earlier presentation of the same type of material.
* * *
LilyPond at IRCAM
I
hope, of course, that regular readers of -devel are familiar with John
Mandereau's involvement in LilyPond. John is our translation meister
and a regular contributor to the LilyPond lists. John and I have
collaborated on English-to-French translations of the performance
indications of all my scores written since 2006, all of which are in
LilyPond. Further, John just finished a year of research at IRCAM in
Paris. It was during John's time at IRCAM that, together with the IRCAM
management, John extended an invitation to me and Víctor Adán to come
to IRCAM and give a talk. Víctor and I chose to talk about LilyPond and
about the work that Víctor and I have done together on Abjad, which is
a Python-based system that wraps LilyPond and lets composers build up
bigger and bigger pieces of notation in an iterative and incremental
way.
(You can read some about Abjad at the project website: www.projectabjad.org. Beware that the documentation is still less than something like 4 or 5% complete.)
Víctor
and I delivered our talk at IRCAM on Friday, February 20th, and we were
able to cover a number of topics, including: information about the
text-based LilyPond input format; the ability to use programming
languages like Python (or C++ or Java) to generate LilyPond input
automatically; the way that LilyPond models measures and barlines (not
as containers but as events in time that can be backgrounded behind
other events); and the typographic control that LilyPond gives over the
collection of grobs. Víctor and I were also able to cover topics that
are particular to our work in Abjad, such as the special concept of the
Abjad spanner, which is inspired directly by the LilyPond conception of
the spanner.
We spent about two hours on the presentation and then followed the
presentation with a hands-on LilyPond tutorial. Interestingly, the
majority of researchers and composers in the audience (around 10 people
total) were already quite familiar with LilyPond and, indeed, some of
the composers present were already using LilyPond to some degree or
another in their own work. (Important in this respect are the scores
and programming utilities of Karim Haddad, a regular member of the
LilyPond lists and composer at IRCAM. Karim has also authored utilities
to help users of IRCAM's important OpenMusic platform interface with
LilyPond, which I'm sure does a lot to help researchers and composers
at IRCAM become introduced to the system.)
* * *
LilyPond at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart
Some
weeks later, on Thursday, April 30th, I was able to give another talk
about LilyPond and the work Víctor and I have done on Abjad, this time
at the Musikhochschule in Stuttgart, Germany. The talk took place in
the late afternoon with the composers at the Musikhochschule studying
there with Marco Stroppa. I chose to cover substantially the same
topics in the Stuttgart talk as Víctor and I had covered earlier in the
IRCAM talk, though for reasons of time I omitted a hands-on LilyPond
tutorial in favor of more examples delivered from a deck of slides.
There were 10 or 11 composers in the audience, and they came from
all over the world: not only Germany but Italy, Israel, Norway and so
on. I always try to ask about (1) engraving program experience and (2)
programming language experience at the beginning of talks like this,
and I was quite surprised that, at the Stuttgart Musikhochschule, none
of the composers in attendance were using LilyPond and, even more
surprisingly, most of the composers hadn't yet even heard of LilyPond.
This differs from the composers that Víctor and I met earlier at IRCAM
and also differed from composers I met last year at Cork, Ireland under
similar circumstances. So the take-away point here is that different
conservatories and music research institutions around the world have
very different levels of exposure to LilyPond and the uses of the
system.
I thought the talk was a success and it was interesting to see that
at least two of the composers present in the audience did have previous
programming experience (with Lisp and Java). I should probably do some
follow-up at some point to see if any of the composers there were
interested enough in LilyPond to start using the system in their own
work, but so far I have not yet the time to do so.
* * *
OK, this concludes the updates and feedback from
earlier in the year. I have to say that each time Víctor and I have
done a version of this presentation (whether singly or together) it
gets easier and easier to explain LilyPond's strong points and provide
examples of what the system can do, especially if you're interested in
modeling parts (or all) of your scores formally with an external
programming language like Python.
Further, it also helps that each new release of LilyPond fixes more
bugs, adds more features, and, *crucially*, provides SUBSTANTIALLY
better documentation than did the releases that came before. The
documentation improvements in recent months have been absolutely
enormous and it is directly to the documentation that motivated
composers who are new to the system always turn after we
have time to work and talk together at a presentation.