Author: Laura Conrad

Comparing Lilypond and Petrucci

While I’m working intensely on the site redesign, you might
have to put up with the things I’m writing about it to help me
think.

Here’s a query I made on the lilypond-users
mailing list:

In general, I love the way lilypond output looks when compared with
other computer-generated sheetmusic.

I’m aware that the ideal espoused by the developers is the 19th century
hand-engraved sheet music.

I usually like the look of my lilypond output as compared with the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth century printers I usually transcribe.

I always like the look of lilypond output as compared with anyone’s
hand-written music.

But when I transcribe Petrucci from the facsimile, the spacing lilypond
does always looks clunky, especially in the parts with large
note-values.

I’ve recently figured out that the large note-values look better if you
put:


context{
Score
override SpacingSpanner #'base-shortest-duration = #(ly:make-moment 1 1)
}

in the layout block.

I believe Petrucci’s spacing is just equal spacing for every note, no
matter what its value.

Does anyone have any tricks for making lily’s output look a little more
like that?

I’m trying to redesign my website, and one idea I have is to have a
graphic in the header with a facsimile on one side and lily’s output on
the other. So it’s important that people not look at the lilypond
output and say, “Wow, that’s ugly compared to the facsimile.” Of course
one way to do that would be to use an ugly facsimile (of which there are
many), but it would be more fun to use a beautiful facsimile and also
have beautiful lilypond.

I’ll let you know if I get any useful answers.

PIctures

Here’s the first page of the Petrucci facsimile of Adieu
mes amours by Josquin:

[Petrucci facsimile]

And here’s the cantus part lilypond produces:

[Lilypond cantus]

And here’s the tenor part from lilypond:

[Lilypond tenor]

Site Redesign Progress

I finally got started on the site redesign, so this has to be a
short one.

It’s the kind of project that every time you solve one problem,
three others pop up, so I suspect it will be at least days if not
weeks before I have it ready even for friendly perusal, let
alone to loose on the unsuspecting public.

I’m starting with the thematic wordpress
theme framework. It allegedly lets you customize almost
anything, but that turns out to be only true if you know CSS. I
learned a bit about it the last time I did site redesign, and
actually sort of liked the look of the site I did for the Boston
Recorder Society (they changed it when I stopped maintaining it,
so you can’t see it there). Anyway, I have the mechanics pretty
much the way I want them, and the look something like the old
BRS site, so now all I have to do is:

  • Write the content for the new pages, including the new
    search form.
  • Fiddle with both LaTeX and Gimp to get the banner at the top
    of the pages right.
  • Fiddle with the wordpress stuff so the sidebars and footers
    are the way I want them.

My accomplishments for yesterday included:

  • Finding where the home page on the new hosting site should go. I
    broke accessing it altogether twice yesterday afternoon trying
    to be too cute about that.
  • Setting up a test environment on my home machine. There’s
    still work to do on this, because I used the Ubuntu wordpress
    package to do it, so I have to fiddle with permissions and
    ownership and groups and maybe links before it really lets me
    work on it right. But I made substantial progress.
  • This morning before breakfast, I installed keyring and now I can do openssh to both the old
    and the new hosting sites without entering passphrases.

I was frustrated enough yesterday when I had access to the new
site broken and hadn’t yet figured out how to customize anything
in thematic that I considered just going to bed and reading
trash fiction, but I have persevered, so far.

The most inspiring story I learned in high school was in the
history of English literature book. Thomas Carlyle had spend
several years writing the history of the French Revolution, and
he gave the only copy of the manuscript to his friend Macauley
to see what he thought. Macauley’s maid (at least, she had to
take the rap) thought it was trash and put it in the fire.
Carlisle went to bed and read trashy fiction for a week and then
got up and wrote the book over again.

I admit that story has more often inspired me to go to bed and
read trashy fiction than to write the history of the French
Revolution. But it’s really true that there are times you just
shouldn’t be doing some things, and it was looking like
yesterday afternoon was the wrong time to be slaving over a hot
computer.

Student Recital

My recorder teacher, John
Tyson, had his annual student recital on Saturday.

This year, we played in a charming little auditorium in the
Morse School, one of the Cambridge public schools.

Program

John teaches a wide range of students, from a doctor who’s
close to a complete beginner, to conservatory students who are
ready to give full-length concerts.

The usual arrangement for a student recital is to put the
less-experienced performers on first, on the grounds that they’re
more nervous, and also so as not to have a beginner playing right
after a virtuoso performance. That got modified a bit this time,
for two reasons:

  • All the students who were being accompanied by John’s wife,
    harpsichordist Miyuki Tsurutani, had to be programmed at the
    end, because she had prior commitments that meant she didn’t
    arrive until almost an hour into the program.
  • There were two composers, Loeillet and Marcello, who were
    represented by two sonatas, and John programmed them so that the
    sonatas would be adjacent to each other.

My performance

The result of that was actually quite favorable placement for
my piece. I was playing a Loeillet sonata with my sister, Judith Conrad, on harpsichord, and the other
person playing Loeillet has only been taking recorder lessons
for a year or so. (He’s been playing piano for years, so he
isn’t actually an inexperienced performer or musician, but he
hasn’t been playing recorder for long enough to be able to make
the amount of difference between an Allegro and an Adagio that a
better player can. Sonatas are really more interesting when the
fast movements are faster than the slow movements.) So I was the first of the more
experienced players to play, after the audience had heard almost
as much intermediate recorder playing as they wanted to.

I played well. I’ve been doing a lot of performing this year,
and it’s been good for getting consistent breath support. I
also finally figured out this spring how hands my size can hold
an alto recorder without having the wrists in a tortured, bent
position, so that makes it possible to have my fingers almost as
relaxed on a 415 alto as they are playing dance music on a
soprano. And I spent the spring doing articulation exercises
while I walked the dog, so I’m finally in a position to play the
fast movements faster than they used to be. And the space was
really very friendly to the alto recorder/harpsichord sound.

My sister, who is a professional keyboard player with a real
flair for continuo, also played well. Unfortunately, we had
only run the whole piece once, and it was before I figured out
how I wanted to play it. Of course someone who’s a professional
accompanist can adjust to an interpretation she’s never heard
pretty fast, but it probably wasn’t fast enough to really carry
off some of the false endings and free tempos I had planned.

So I told people I wished my sister and I had had more time to
rehearse before performing. John said he didn’t think it
mattered; that you could tell it was two intelligent musicians
doing really cool stuff, even if not quite the same cool stuff.
He did say how impressed he was with my poise.

The rest of the evening

The disadvantage of using this space is that the modest fee
John paid to rent it only covered three hours, including
harpsichord setup and takedown time. The penultimate group was three New
England Conservatory students, including Ching-Wei Lin, John’s
most advanced student, playing the Dieupart Cinquieme
Suite in F. They had to cut it short, and play only the
first three movements. If you were considering this as a concert
that would have been the wrong place to make the cut. Of course,
considering it as a performing opportunity for people who don’t
always have as much chance to play for an audience as they should
for the amount of work they do, it was exactly the right thing to
cut, since they have all kinds of opportunities to perform.

But most of the players and their families could go over to
John and Miyuki’s house for a very good party, including jazz and
rock improvisations by the assembled.

Following up

Ubuntu upgrade

The Ubuntu people made a change to the X windows interface for
the 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) release. It doesn’t matter very much
to me, but it does (by default) remove a feature that I use once
in a while. Formerly, if you wanted to kill your X windows session
without rebooting the machine, you could say
<CTL><ALT><backspace>, and now by default that
sequence doesn’t do anything.

I’m not sure I agree with this decision — the rationale is
apparently that people sometimes hit that sequence by accident,
which doesn’t seem to ever happen to me.

In any case, if you want the feature, putting it back is pretty
easy. There are places that will tell you what to put in your
/etc/X11/xorg.conf file, but the easy way is to install the
“dontzap” package, and then run dontzap -d.

Lilies of the valley

When I posted the last set of garden pictures, I forgot to
include the lillies of the valley.

[mint]

Buying ebooks, Part II

I’m sure you’re sitting on the edge of your seat to find out
what happened to my quest to give the publishing industry money
for a book I can read on my Nokia 810 Internet
Tablet.

I told you a couple of days ago about trying
to buy a .lit book from a linux computer running firefox.

Next I tried buying one from a Windows computer running
Internet Explorer. Here’s what I wrote about it to a mailing
list that discusses such things:

I keep hearing (I think on this list as well as other places) that
people buy ebooks at fictionwise.com in .lit format, and then use clit
to turn them into html and read them on the platform of their choice.

I have occasionally gotten a .lit format book from somewhere and been
able to use clit to read it, but I’d never seen one I wanted to buy.

Then last week, I found out that The Lord of the Rings is now
available as an official ebook, and decided I would buy it.

This turns out to be too hard for me to do. You would think that if I
wanted to give someone $30 for a book, they would give me the book, but
not if Microsoft is involved.

First they said I should get a free one to make sure I had a process for
making it work. That sounded reasonable, and they actually sold me a
free ebook without asking for my credit card number.

Then I went to download it, and they said I had to be on a Windows
computer (and in Windows Explorer).

So I went away, but after a few days, I realized I had a couple of other
things I needed to boot windows to do, so I booted Windows, and fired up
IE and went to my bookshelf in Fictionwise.

Then they said I needed the latest Microsoft Reader software, so I
downloaded that.

Then they said I needed to activate the Reader on that computer. It
took quite a while to find out how I should do that, and I had to type
illegible characters several times to set up a Passport account.

Then they said I needed to install ActiveX, without telling me how to do
that. I did a search, and found someone who had the same problem and
had been told that it’s a browser option and where to go to change it,
so I did that.

But I’m still getting the error message about needing ActiveX, or to be
logged in as a real user (which I am).

So how do you buy a .lit book from Fictionwise, if you do, or is there
some other way to get commercial DRM books like the Tolkein that will
let me read it on a linux computer?

And how does anyone stay in business if it’s this hard to buy something
from them?

This reminds me of the time when I was in college and the lock to my
dorm room was balky, so I started thinking about getting the kind of
religion where you don’t ever lock your door. I already almost have the
kind of religion where I never buy DRM, and it looks like I’m not
capable of backsliding from it even if I want to.

One of the readers of the list took pity on my and sent me a
500 line python script that converts ereader books to html.

So this morning, I bought The Hobbit from fictionwise in the secure ereader
format. I had to tell the download program my name and credit
card information, but then it just gave me the file, without
complaining about what browser I was using or making me type
illegible characters or anything.

After that, there was only an hour or so of debugging, and now
the book looks pretty good in all of ereader running under Wine, firefox, and FBReader.

Actually, it looks a bit better in firefox than in the other
versions. FBReader is clumsy about placing the .png files for
the runes, and eReader doesn’t indent the verse gracefully.

For those who want the gory details, the two problems I had to
fix before the HTML displayed correctly were:

  • The .html file didn’t specify the character encoding, so all the
    quotation marks and such were displayed as something like 222
    in emacs, and as a ? in a diamond box in firefox. The fix was
    to put:
    <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
    charset=ISO-8859-1">

    at the top of the file.

  • The html file referred to a lot of the graphics as generated
    filenames
    with mixed case letters, but the script had actually written the
    names with all lower case. I haven’t scripted that fix yet, but
    if I hit the problem again, I probably will.

I haven’t yet read it on the Nokia, but my experience is that
if FBReader on the desktop can read it, so can FBReader on the
tablet.

So if you want electronic books without being a pirate, you can
have them, even if you want to use non-commercial software to
read them.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001CX5UAO&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Garden

Time for more garden pictures.

Roses

They’re still in pretty tight buds. I staked the one in front
that was falling over the sidewalk.

[rosebud]

Woodruff

Still lots of pretty tight buds, but it’s starting to open
up.

[woodruff]

Rhubarb

It’s continuing to get bigger. The directions said not to cut
it for two years, and to cut carefully the third year. This is
the third year, so I’m expecting at least a little bit of sauce
for something. After this, I should have to bake pies to be
able to put anything else in the plot.

[rhubarb]
[new rhubarb leaf]

Pansies

The pansies have been flattened by the recent rain.

[flat pansies]

Alliums

The Giant Alliums are about to burst into bloom. I bought a
bulb assortment (tulips, daffodils…) in the fall of 1984, and these are the only
things still going from that investment.

[Giant Allium bud]

Mint

This was slow to come up at all this year. I was worried that it had been killed by the cold
weather in January, but it’s doing well now.

[mint]

Buying ebooks

On my list for later this morning is to boot the laptop into
windows and do several things I can’t do on linux:

  • Print the final tax returns from TaxCut.
  • Fix some annoyances with the Universal remote
    setup    .
  • See if it’s really possible to buy DRM’d books from Fictionwise and read them
    on a non-comercial OS.

The others have been discussed at length (taxes
and remote); this is the day for
my rant on the ebook marketplace.

I’m surprised that this topic hasn’t come up before, more than
two months into this daily blog, because a lot of the blogs I
read are devoted to rants about the publishing industry’s
benighted attitude towards ebooks. So I would have expected to
have wanted to rant myself before this, but it wasn’t until last
week that I felt the rant coming on.

What happened last week was the discovery that
The Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit
and The Children of Hurin, but apparently not
The Silmarillion) is available in official ebook
form.

I’ve had an illegal download for some time, and that’s the way
I reread it these days, but it certainly isn’t ideal — it
screws up all the letters with accents, for instance. So
although I’ve already bought it in both paperback and hardcover,
I would be willing to buy it again as an ebook, if that meant I
could read it on my device of choice (the Nokia
N810).

If you haven’t been following this topic, the major topic of
debate is the fact that many publishers and authors aren’t
comfortable just letting you download a book in a format like html
or text or various open book-specific formats that you
can read on any computer you can put it on. They feel that there
will be too much piracy, and they’re only comfortable letting you
buy their books if they have something called DRM (digital rights
management) attached to them. There are a lot of good arguments
against this point of view. The most concise summary of them is
that if you buy a book with DRM, you don’t own it, you’re only
renting it for an unknown length of time.

The conventional wisdom these days is that if you need to
convert a DRM’d ebook to something readable on an open platform,
the Microsoft .lit form is the format of choice, since it’s
apparently just a wrapper around some html. So once you’ve
unwrapped it, you aren’t any longer bound by the DRM limitations.

So when I found that Fictionwise didn’t have Tolkein’s books in
what they call “multiformat”, which means you can download any
of a number of open formats to any device you like once you’ve
paid for it, I attempted to buy them in .lit format.

The shopping cart was fairly confusing, but I manged to get to
where I could push a button to complete the purchase, but it
warned me that I should download a free one first to verify that
I would be able to read it on my platform of choice.

That sounded like a good idea, so I moved all the Tolkeins to
my wish list, and tried to “buy” the suggested free .lit
book.

They had no problem letting me do a $0.00 purchase without
giving them my credit card number (don’t laugh — lots of
shopping carts won’t), but then when I went to
download it, I couldn’t because I wasn’t on a Windows
computer.

So in order to give them lots of money for a book I want to
buy, I have to boot an operating system I don’t want to run.

And then they’re surprised that ebooks aren’t taking off
faster.

If you do want to see whether you like ebooks, I recommend
getting started the way I did — either download works that are
out of copyright from gutenberg or manybooks, or buy non-DRM’d
books from Baen or
fictionwise.

Maybe it will turn out that there’s a way to get DRM’d books to
work without booting windows, or that booting the windows
occasionally to do the download is worth being able to get the
books. If so, I’ll let you know.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000EUGX70&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001CX5UAO&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Fortepiano Concert

The HIP (Historically Informed Performance) movement has been
moving steadily into the nineteenth and even twentieth
centuries. I was aware that there was enough difference in
orchestral instruments and their style of playing for this to be
interesting for orchestral works. And of course, singing and
playing music in the size hall it was designed for can be a lot
more satisfying than in a space designed to seat two or three
orders of magnitude more people than the composers and original
performers envisioned.

However, it wasn’t until last Sunday that I really realized
that the nineteenth century piano repertoire could benefit from
HIP.

The Loring Greenough House in Jamaica Plain, built in 1760, has
a Longman and Broderip square piano built in about 1800. I heard
a concert played on this piano last sunday by Judith Conrad.

The first two thirds or so of the concert was what I expect
from fortepianists — eighteenth century music where the
composers clearly expected non-equal temperaments and the piano
was playing in ensemble with instruments like the baroque flute
that hadn’t yet been engineered to play in a modern concert
hall. I particularly enjoyed the Haydn Flute sonata, ably
played by baroque flutist Michael Shand.

The fugues of Antonin Reicha, who straddled the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, also benefited from the shorter reverb
times and more intimate tone of the earlier instrument.

But then they switched to Mendelssohn. I grew up hearing
pieces like the Mendelssohn Songs without Words
played on a Steinway, and it hadn’t really occurred to me that
they too would benefit from the more intimate sound of the
earlier instrument. It’s clearly music for the living room and
not the concert hall, but I hadn’t realized that it was for a
living room with a cute little piano that plays thirds that are
consonances and gets out of the way of singers and instruments
who are trying to make music with it instead of dominating
them.

Another HIP aspect of this performance was that the audience
was invited to sing along on vocal works that complemented the
performance. I personally find this adds a lot to my ability to concentrate on other people’s music for two hours.

Unfortunately, the first Sunday in May is a terrible time to
play a concert, because you have to share your audience with all
the other people who are trying to play concerts then. So this one
drew 9 people and was probably doing well in comparison to some
other events. I would suggest that most performers whose rehearsal
schedules aren’t tied to the academic calendar should avoid concerts in
December and May.

Report on the May 5 meeting

We played:

  • Barnes (ed.), English Country Dance Tunes
    • Prince William of Gloucester’s Waltz
    • A Trip to Tunbridge
    • Bath Carnival
    • Fandango
  • Morley, Miraculous love’s wounding
  • Phalese (ed.), Motets from Bicinia
    • Beatus vir
    • Beatus homo}
    • O Maria mater pia,
    • Per illud ave prolatum
    • Oculus non vidit
    • Justus cor suum
    • Expectatio justorum laetitia
    • Qui sequitur me
    • Justi tulerunt spolia
    • Sancti mei
    • Qui vult venire post me
    • Serve bone
    • Fulgebunt justi sicut lilium
    • Sicut rosa
  • Glogauer LIederbuch:
    • Du lenze gut
    • Die Katzenpfote
  • Morley, Say, Deere, will you not have mee?
  • Harrison, Give me the sweet delights of love

Schedule

We’ll be having our usual Tuesday drop in meetings at 7:45 PM
at my place
for most of the forseeable future.

We will skip the meeting on June 9
during the week of BEMF.

We’re thinking about a cookout to celebrate the Summer Solstice
on June 21.

Other events

John Tyson’s student recital will take place on Saturday, June
9 starting at 6 PM. If you’re interested in coming, let me know
and I’ll send you directions.

Lots of people we know will be playing at the BEMF fringe
concerts. More details later.

Another picture from the Walk for Hunger

It’s far too late to do a real post, so here’s another picture
from the Walk for Hunger:

[Sunny, Ishmael, Laura, Paul, Anne]

The photographer was Ishmael Stefanov (left) by time delay.

One of the performers, who didn’t read any preliminary play
lists, and still didn’t really have his notebook in
order at the actual performance, told me yesterday that we should have done a
completely different kind of program.

This is probably why the great conductors never socialize with
the orchestra.