RE: How to get irrational tuplets inside a regular meter like 9/8

[Andrew Bernard]

Hello Carl,

I engrave scores for a colleague who is a prominent representative of the
New Complexity School. Recently, with the advent of people such as Phantomas
here (Thanks, Urs! For this person who insults us takes the cowardly
approach of hiding behind anonymity, against all conventions of mailing list
communities) the intent of the New Complexity founders seems to have been
distorted into self indulgent complexity for its own sake, resulting in
unplayable scores of no real artistic value. To this extent, since the
concept has been devalued and polluted, most New Complexity composers now
distance themselves from this term. One can see why. We have a good (bad?)
example here.

But I just wanted to mention that in my work over the last couple of years I
have been able to develop an extensive library of Scheme code and various
extensions that enable me to set music that is only partly similar to the
Common Era period notation that lilypond excels in. It is a tribute to the
extraordinary excellence of lilypond that it can be made to create scores of
a type never originally envisioned, with a high degree of beauty. I am also
at great pains to point out that I could never have built up this library
without the kind generosity and open heartedness of the skilled list members
here: Thomas Morley, David Kastrup, Urs Liska, David Nalesnik, Simon
Albrecht, David Wright, Kieran MacMillan, and many others (pardon me for
omitting names!). Without their unstinting help I could not have achieved
the excellence in my engraving that people comment on so positively. This
sort of result takes a lot of effort, but success can be achieved.

This is a valuable and precious community. Those like Phantomas who do not
understand this are free to start their own communities. Perhaps they
should.

Andrew



-----Original Message-----
From: lilypond-user
[mailto:address@hidden On Behalf Of
Carl Sorensen
Sent: Wednesday, 9 November 2016 11:50 AM
To: mclaren <address@hidden>; address@hidden
Subject: Re: How to get irrational tuplets inside a regular meter like 9/8


If you look at the founding documents for LilyPond, you will see that
LilyPond was not created to be a tool for representing New Complexity
scores.  In fact, the essay says:

"LilyPond is inspired by traditional manual engravings published by European
music publishers in and towards the end of the first half of the twentieth
century, including Bärenreiter, Duhem, Durand, Hofmeister, Peters, and
Schott. This is sometimes regarded as the peak of traditional musical
engraving practice. As we have studied these editions we have learned a
great deal about what goes into a well-engraved score, and the aspects that
we wanted to imitate in LilyPond.":

LilyPond's target is traditional musical engraving.  Anything else is gravy.