Re: Editing notes in a separate file

[Michael J. O'Donnell]

You are proposing very good solutions for the short term production of
scores. I am more concerned with the very long term management of the
information.

The object is to

1. have a file containing data entry from the MS which represents the
uncorrected manuscript, and which (almost) never needs to change;

2. introduce all changes, including musical corrections and adjustments,
for performance scores, without modifying the MS data entry.

For the short term, the tag method is a very good way to produce
multiple versions in a project involving one person or small group of
collaborators. In the case of a historical MS, there should be one
representation of the MS, archived and (almost) never changed. Various
derived scores should be produced separately from the MS representation,
using it as input. The editors of the derived scores may be completely
independent of those who produced the MS representation.

Sure, a future editor may take a copy of the MS representation, and
modify it. But each such step introduces extra confusion in the
information, and leads to other sorts of errors.

I was trying to keep the description short, but I guess I provided too
little information. Here's some context:

I have  a beautiful facsimile of the Canonici Misc MA, Bodleian 213,
which I acquired on a whim when I was singing a DuFay song taken from
the MS. I wondered whether Lilypond provided a notation in which it
would be sensible to typeset the entire MS in a form that looked a lot
like the MS, allowed for very easy proof reading of the data entry (and
discussion of the questionable choices), then also allowed systematic
editing of performance scores in modern notation, with a variety of
editorial choices.

I started experimenting with the first song, covering 3 folio sides. I
observed the fundamental problems with Lilypond's support of mensural
notation, but I can work on prototypes that will be easy to adapt when
developers fix that part of Lilypond some day. I cooked up my own
prototype of a set of macros that produce mensural notation or modern
notation from parameters (this is not quite trivial, since Lilypond's
representation of mensural durations is a bit tangled, and even
ambiguous regarding actual performance duration in the case of perfectum
vs. imperfectum).

I have reached the point where I produce crude but somewhat useful
prototypes of both the mensural and modern notation. Synchronizing
duration between the three voices in the modern notation currently
requires me to enter corrections in the primary representation of the
notes from the MS. Tags make it easy to include or exclude those
corrections, but I am still faced with entering every variant of every
correction into the MS data, which would be better left alone while
editing the modern version. The problem is not so much the tags that I
enter now (although the need to experiment with a variety of different
synchronizations already makes it a pain), but with those that I or
someone else would want in 10 or 20 years or even much later. MSs and
information of this sort lie fallow for a long time before reaching users.

I didn't expect Lilypond to have the right feature for this
information-management problem, and I expect to either scale back the
goal of the work, or to work out some preprocessing with tools outside
of Lilypond (which degrades the robustness of the product, since other
users need to collect the same tools). In the hope that I had overlooked
something (I've read the whole notation manual, but there are clearly
things that haven't made it in yet---I've found some of them in the
*.scm and *.ly sources but there are bound to be others that I've
missed) I posted the query.

Regarding my own knowledge: I am the merest dilletante regarding ancient
music, and piece together my editorial decisions from Wikipedia articles
and other easily accessible sources. I don't hope to produce an
authoritative edition of Bodleian 213, only something that's
structurally convenient to correct using better knowledge from my
further learning or from real experts. On the other hand, I am an
expert, with decades of experience, in information management. I may not
have explained the problem with continual addition of tagged corrections
to the same original file of MS data very well, but it is a huge one
that comes back to bite projects when someone revisits data after some
years.

Cheers,

Mike O'Donnell

Kieren MacMillan wrote:
> Hi Michael,
>
>   
>> Thanks for pointing out \tag. I've already read up, and experimented
>> with it. It doesn't solve the problem, because it requires that I
>> anticipate every possible correction when entering the data from the MS.
>> The only way to get useful coverage is to tag every note with a
>> different tag, which is too complicated and invites other sorts of errors.
>>     
>
> Either I don't understand what you're doing, or you haven't properly 
> understood the use of \tag.
>
> I'm suggesting that you do something like
>
> \version "2.13.9"
> notes = \relative e'' {
>    e4 \tag #'MS {e} \tag #'corr {d} c d   |
>    e e e2   |
> }
> \markup { ORIGINAL: }
> \score { \keepWithTag #'MS \notes }
> \markup { CORRECTED: }
> \score { \keepWithTag #'corr \notes }
>
> Clearly, this doesn't require tagging "every note with a different tag" — you 
> simply tag the notes for different editions as you need them.
> What am I misunderstanding about your particular situation?
>
> Cheers,
> Kieren.
>