Re: Engraving essay questions and RFC

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Op woensdag 07-10-2009 om 22:18 uur [tijdzone -0600], schreef Andrew
Hawryluk:

> Have I missed anything?
> Please discuss?

What about the bland look of the henle 666 edition of the solo cello
suites compared with baerenreiter's?

For me, this grasps the essence of

   * what is wrong with computer notated music

ie: why the graham's mao did we start this insane job of building
lilypond? [and why should the reader junk the piece of sh*t she's
using now to enrgave her scores?], so it sets the stage for

   * why should I care and learn about/use lilypond

It is kind of hard to immediately see what's wrong with the henle
edition.  Everything looks neat and okay.  Possibly even "better",
more computerized and thus possibly unescapably more sterile than
the hand-engraved version.  It really puzzled Han-Wen and me for
quite a while why computer music notation is bad.  We really wanted
to fix that, but we first had to find why it's bad.

This intriguing quest[ion] could make someone want to read the rest
of the essay too.  It now starts off with a nice history of [plate]
engraving, but why would I want to know or read about that?

This start was part of the talk that Han-Wen and I gave for a while.
You'll have to note the exact vertical lines (grid-lines, almost)
that the barlines and individual notes are on.  That's the most
noticable clue here, which leads to the small note+accidental spacing
differences and the optical note spacing corrections, that give
a score a much more lively/alive look, making it also more readable
and less awkward (esp. the optical spacing).

I'm not sure if you'd want to visually annotate any typography
errors.  It was possibly a bit awkwardly done, but visual marks
do make errors immediately clear; much easier than reading text
and then comparing it to a picture?

I also like the lyrics benchmarking bit :-)

Jan.


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Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
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