Re: A must-see for anybody on this list

[Urs Liska]

Am 14.02.2013 16:05, schrieb Joseph Rushton Wakeling:
> On 02/14/2013 01:36 PM, David Kastrup wrote:
> > a) a reliable and scaleable mechanism to make individual problems go
> > away by manual labor.  WYSIWYG systems offer that.  I think that
> > Frescobaldi tries offering a bit of that as well.
>
> The really simple way of putting this: "It needs to be as easy as 
> possible to tweak stuff where you don't like the automatic results."
>
> From a publisher point of view I think also ease of creating a "house 
> style" probably plays a large part.  I don't personally find it very 
> easy to create something like a "style sheet" for LP.
While it may not seem to be intuitive you can actually write extremely 
robust "house style" sheets (or rather libraries which I find much more 
reliable than any preset templates or whatever you could use with 
WYSIWYG software.
With the additional advantage that you can (quite) easily apply changes 
to that style sheet to existing scores.

One thing that could be stressed as a "selling point" towards publishers 
is the "diffability" of Lilypond sources. I find it extremely 
interesting to have the possibility of git-driven editing/publishing 
work-flows. Last year I had communication with a Henle official who told 
me that they have a very fixed work-flow which consists of a) the editor 
preparing his edition (in whatever form), b) Henle preparing the 
engraving according to their standards, and c) no less than six 
proof-reading cycles.
I think such a work-flow could profit extremely by a scenario where all 
involved people work on the same codebase - the editor preparing the 
score with LilyPond, the engraver beautifying directly in this codebase, 
and all proof-readers having access to that too.

I will soon pick up on that communication, and then I'll surely raise 
the engraving issue, showing them some of my 'raw' scores, Janek's 
beautiful final versions and maybe some exemplary git commits.
I don't expect this to have immediate impact, but who knows ...

I will also prepare a presentation on 'plain text based work-flows for 
writing (about) music' that I will do at my university, and I intend to 
also present this personally to a few people occupied in scholarly 
editions. Such collaborative approaches are perfectly suited for 
git-based work.
It would be good to get the attention of such institutions, as they 
might have some influence on publishers' decisions (although I know that 
this influence is actually quite small ...).

In the meantime I repeat that it would be a very valuable thing to be 
able to export the (raw) music of a LilyPond score to MusicXML.
Maybe I wouldn't have decided so easily to switch to LaTeX if I hadn't 
known about the possibility to export my documents to word processor 
formats.
For example I think it would be easier to convince academics that it is 
a good idea to prepare an edition (collaboratively) using LilyPond and 
git if they know that they can still export the result to a publisher 
who insists on Finale/Sibelius.
If once that would be the case, the step would be smaller to talk 
publishers into using LilyPond.

I wouldn't hold my breath on all this, but I'll do my best anyway (where 
I can do something at all).

Best
Urs

> > ...
> Well, define what you mean by a musical "text" (or for that matter a 
> literary one).  The problem of most historical works is that there 
> isn't _a_ text -- there are multiple conflicting texts where there 
> needs to be very careful work to unravel which of the possibilities is 
> most likely to be the one the composer or author really intended.  
> This is where you need an edition that covers the evidence available, 
> the alternative possibilities at various moments, and which gives a 
> rationale for individual editorial choices (with enough information 
> for you to make a personally informed decision about whether to accept 
> the editorial decision or not, and what you might choose instead).
>
> Consider what you get in IMSLP -- an out of copyright score, which in 
> practice usually means a 19th-century edition prepared by an editor 
> who most likely had limited source material available and who was 
> willing to liberally sprinkle his own interpretative preferences all 
> over the music.  Contrast that with what you get with a high-quality 
> modern Urtext edition (although even here you have to be careful -- 
> I've found scores published as "Urtext" which display a shocking level 
> of editorial intervention).
(somewhat OT): Currently I'm busy with a new edition of some late 19th 
century songs.
The only available sources are the first editions, no reprints, no 
manuscripts, no copies with manual entries. While we assumed that we 
just had to emend a few typos it turned out to be a quite complicated 
matter and we'll end up with around 15 (heavily crowded) pages of 
critical remarks for around 100 pages of music ...
> Even if IMSLP gets (say) the first edition of a work, very often that 
> publication is multiple steps removed from the composer and may even 
> date from after their death -- not to mention the errors that may have 
> crept in during the publication process.  IMSLP has very nice 
> high-quality scans of the first editions of the Debussy preludes, for 
> example -- where it's readily possible to identify a number of errors 
> that stem from Debussy's notational indications clashing with the 
> "rules of engraving" that Durand's craftsmen operated by.
>
> Put simply, the ability to easily reproduce a given musical text fails 
> to reflect the value of what _good_ music publishers (like Henle) 
> actually do.
+1
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