Re: Do we really offer the future?

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hi Andrew (et al.),

> I would have thought that, like the invention of desktop publishing in the 
> 1980’s, which allowed small scale companies and individuals to produce 
> professional publications, lilypond frees composers, musicians, and engravers 
> from the tyranny - and rejections - of the hidebound established music 
> publishers. Why do we need Peters and Barenreiter and others?

Have you seen the “graphic design” of the millions of people who bought a Mac 
(or whatever) and Adobe Illustrator (or whatever) and started cranking out 
“design”? The situation is exactly analogous in the music world: the vast 
majority of people (composers, etc.) *think* they know how to make a readable 
music score, or at least trust that Finale/Sibelius/whatever will do it for 
them, and the results are atrocious.

Publishing houses, for the most part, are Awfulness Sieves… and as such are 
[mostly] necessary evils, at a certain level.

> My composer colleague of the New Complexity School will never be published by 
> the Big Firms. But he will be published by me. And with the web nowadays, the 
> big distribution networks the Old Companies have is no longer important.

For better or worse, I have chosen to self-publish my own works. But I’m not 
deluding myself into thinking that “the big distribution networks the Old 
Companies have is no longer important” — that’s a fallacy, and easily debunked. 
It may well be that *one day* that statement will be more true than false… but 
we’re still at least a decade off from that Rapture, maybe more.

> I would like to see every engraver using lilypond

I don’t really care; I only care about engraving quality. What I *would* like 
to see is every engraver outputting music of equal or superior quality to the 
scores I engrave myself in Lilypond, and that’s clearly not happening right now.

If (as some have suggested) Steinberg’s pending application has output of equal 
or greater quality to Lilypond, and there is some reasonable way (e.g., 
MusicXML or MEI) for me to “own the source indefinitely”, that application's 
ease of use (read: GUI and other tools and workflows) could certainly sway me 
into abandoning Lilypond.

Unlike many on this list, I have no burning need to force Open Source 
Philosophy on the world if it’s not willing to prove its own worth.

> If [established firms] need vast amounts of explaining to understand it, they 
> simply will not get it.

So true. Hence my repeated pleas to try to make Lilypond usable without vast 
amounts of explaining.

Cheers,
Kieren.
________________________________

Kieren MacMillan, composer
‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info
‣ email: address@hidden