File structure builder, comments

[Christian Conkle]

I'm thinking about typesetting a number of orchestral pieces from old Dover
reprints to go along with an orchestration course I'm taking.  I've been
thinking about ways to make the process easier (since I don't have the scores
yet) and have been considering writing a script (in Ruby) to generate 'custom'
file trees: the files for each instrument's music definition, for printing
parts, and for the score.  One would provide this hypothetical script with a
description of the orchestration (list of instruments) and it would generate all
the files and write the \score block, and then be able to dive right into
entering music.

Has anyone else done such a thing?  Does anyone else have workflow sugesstions
for orchestral engraving?  Also, are there any particularly good "models" of
orchestral scores set in Lilypond around?  I've been working from Will Oram's
engraving of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, which I got from Mutopia.


I've been using Lilypond for about six months of music school now, engraving
almost all of my classwork and personal musical output with it.  I've been
generally quite pleased.  The output is certainly superior in my eyes to the
Sibelius and Finale printouts I'm surrounded by--my piano instructor immediately
compared the engraving of a continuo part I had made to older hand-engraved
music.  (She named a publisher: I keep wanting to say Bärenreiter which would be
perfect but I'm just not sure!)

The main enduring problem I've had as a Lilypond user has been, unsurprisingly
enough, coexisting with the Sibelius users around me.  My orchestration
professor (and counterpoint and composition and theory... it's a small school!)
issues assignments as Sibelius files and expects (although, thankfully, doesn't
require) Sibelius files in return.   Siblius, of course, doesn't export to any
other format at all (MusicXML output costs $120!).  It'd be very nice, however,
to be able to produce MusicXML or some other intermediary format from my
Lilypond scores to be able to produce Sibelius files.  (Mainly for MIDI
output--for inclass demonstrations of student work.)