Re: Contemporary Music Notation

[Urs Liska]

Am 09.10.2014 06:31, schrieb Marco Bagolin:

The notation contemporary music is so diverse, I know.

I wonder if actually Lilypond has commands for drawing graphic symbols, as line circle, curve, square, circle, etc...

I'll give you a few places to start:

http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/formatting-text.html#graphic-notation-inside-markup
This shows how you can add graphical elements where you could use text.
http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/graphic
This gives an impression what can be done here. Very important may be the \path, the \epsfile and the \postscript commands.

A nice thing about LilyPond's approach is that once you have invented something you can make it available as a command so it can easily be reused. You can also make such commands process arguments so they can be versatile and context-dependent.
As an example have a look at the attached image. This is what someone on the list (Piaras Hoban) came up with when I asked for a function to write a stemmed glissando notation. The underlying function is quite complicated but you can use it by simply writing

\stemmedGlissando #'(15 . #f) c'4 

to tell LilyPond that the next glissando will have 15 stems and no (the #f) trailing grace note to indicate the target note.

http://lilypondblog.org/2014/04/using-special-characters-from-smufl-fonts/
This only deals with including glyphs from the SMuFL standard (which already gives a lot of useful symbols for contemporary notation), but it shows how you can replace default note heads with arbitrary elements (e.g. something you created with the above graphic commands).

http://lilypondblog.org/author/nsceaux/
although not dealing with contemporary notation these posts may also be of interest for you.

In general you should expect that it won't be an immediate success story for you if you have to learn LilyPond itself *and* the specific problems of contemporary notation in one step. But I can only recommend giving it a try and have some patience. Maybe you should *not* immediately start with a real-world project with a deadline ;-)

As I said things one defines can be made available as commands. And as such there is the inherent possibility to put them in a library.
You may have a look at https://github.com/openlilylib/openlilylib. This library could well use a contemporary-notation category, and if you should stick to the idea it would be possible to create a really useful library along with your learning experience.

Best
Urs

2014-10-08 22:18 GMT+02:00 Urs Liska <address@hidden>:

Am 08.10.2014 22:11, schrieb Marco Bagolin:

Hello all,

I'm new Lilypond user and I am interested in Contemporary Music Notation.

I read all 2.8 Contemporary music manual section:
http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/contemporary-music

but lot of the chapters are empty and most of links are inactive.

Yes, this is a pity.

Please how can I learn to use Lilypond for write music using Contemporary Music Notation?

I think the best way would be to come up with examples (how should we know what you are interested in specifically?) and ask on this list.
If you're not overdoing it (i.e. asking too many questions at a time) you will probably get solutions, advice, but also an impression about the (current) limitations.

Please don't be disappointed if it seems daunting at first. Even if it is not always straightforward to get it right LilyPond definitely is a good tool for doing non-standard notation too.

If you are seriously interested in the topic and stick to it for a while we could also try to use your learning experience to provide more documentation (be it in the manual or in other places). The issue with these empty chapters seems to be that there is no clear concept about what "contemporary notation" actually is.  If I have a topic such as time administration it is quite clear what has to be covered ...

Best wishes
Urs

Thank you in advance for all your answer and help.

Regards

Marco Bagolin

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Stemmed-glissando.png
Description: PNG image