Publishing – Page 3 – LayMusic.org

Additions, March 10

Tomorrow is the marriage day by Thomas Weelkes
Tomorrow is the marriage day (down a fourth) by Thomas Weelkes
Some men desire Spouses (down a fourth) by Thomas Weelkes
Jockey, thine horn pipes dull (down a fourth) by Thomas
Weelkes
Africa (transposed to C major) by William Billings
Egypt by James Leach
Pasttime with good company by Henry VIII

Additions, March 9, 2009

I finally fixed the program that automagically puts
transcriptions written in lilypond directly into the database.
So here’s some of what I’ve done since February 27, 2008:

We
be three poor Mariners by Thomas Ravenscroft
There
were three Ravens sat on a tree, by Thomas Ravenscroft
A
Browning by John Baldwin. This transcription was
commissioned by Renaissonics; it’s a
classic example of a piece that’s easier to play if the editor
doesn’t insist on confusing you with barlines.
When Daphne from fair Phoebus did fly. This is an anonymous
consort song, with four instrumental parts as well as the
vocal. There’s an interesting variant in the words: “Her silken skirt scarce covered her thighs”
instead of “Her silken scarf scarce sheltered her eyes.”
When
Daphne from fair Phoebus did fly (a step down)
When
Daphne from fair Phoebus did fly (a fourth down)
The
dark is my delight, another anonymous consort song.
Remembered by most people who’ve ever performed it as one of the
more sexually explicit pieces we’ve ever done without using any
“four-letter” words.

There’s still a lot of stuff I’ve done in the last year to add
— notably some baroque sonatas, some Weelkes, and lots of
Susato. I’ll try and get it done in the next couple of days, now
that my procedure is debugged (fingers crossed) for the new computer.

Updating

I’m really sorry its been so long (over a year now) since I uploaded new stuff,
and I still haven’t done that, but I went through the stuff that
was still using ancient versions of lilypond and uploaded some of
it that is now using less ancient versions, including:

Campian, Never weather-beaten Saile
Dowland, Me, me and none but me
Gibbons, The Silver Swan
Josquin, Deploration on the death of
Ockegham
Morley, April is in my mistress’ face

Site updated

I’ve been very remiss in not updating the site, although I have
been doing some transcriptions, and a certain amount of editing
old transcriptions as problems appear.

I can’t give you a good list of what’s changed, but the edits
to everything that’s already on the site have now been
uploaded.

I’m hoping to get to adding the new things that have been
transcribed since last summer soon.

And before the Boston Early Music
Festival in June, I hope to have the site redesigned, with
better search capabilities, and a more streamlined way for me to
add things.

Yet another advantage to open source music

As you may have noticed, all the music on this site is released under the Gnu Public License. This means you are free to use it any way you like, and modify it for your own purposes, with a few not very onerous conditions.

I do this because I don’t expect everybody to want to use it exactly the way I do. Specifically, I often find dead-tree printed music is in the wrong key or has the wrong clefs, or too many bar lines or something that makes it harder for me or the people I play with. And then I wish I had a copy in lilypond or ABC or even MIDI so that I could just change it. So when I publish my transcriptions, I put up not only the PDF file my group plays from, but the ABC and/or lilypond source and the MIDI output.

I got an email last week from Christoph Dalitz, who said:

I am pleased to let you know that some of your music editions
published under the GPL have found an unexpected use in a
use in a research study on automatic staff line removal
(a preprocessing step in OMR). The study has meanwhile
been finished and that the results have just been published
in IEEE TPAMI:

C. Dalitz, M. Droettboom, B. Czerwinski, I. Fujinaga:
A Comparative Study of Staff Removal Algorithms.
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence,
vol. 30, no. 5, pp. 753-766, May 2008

You can read the study here

So when you wonder what use free information is, think of the future generation of automated music scanners which will be better because of the people who put free music up on the web. As well as of the people who can play my music in the clef and key they want it in.

Changes, February 27, 2008

Come come, let’s begin by Thomas Weelkes, was one of the first pieces I transcribed for this website. I’ve now updated it to a modern version of lilypond, and put up a version a fourth down. There are also some note fixes.

There’s an important note fix to Fortuna desperata.

And there’s not so much a note fix as a reformating to remove unnecessary clef changes in the version of Gabrielli’s Canzon II a 6 which is transposed down a fourth.

Additions, February 14, 2008

Thomas Weelkes, Strike it up, Tabor, and also a version down a third. This is a piece about being a Morris Dance team leader on Mayday, so we may play it at the Walk for Hunger.

Additions, February 7, 2008

We did a double tenorlied by Ludwig Senfl, so we also did settings of the two tunes used as the tenors.

Anononymous, Italian, late 15th century, Fortuna desperata
Clemens non papa Ich stuend an einem Morgen
Ludwig Senfl Fortuna — Ich stuend an einem Morgen

Additions, February 1, 2008

Hayne van Gizeghem, De tous biens plaine. I was at a concert where they did a full set of pieces written on this tune, and felt I would have enjoyed it more if I’d known the tune better. The great jazz improvizers always used tunes that the great jazz vocalists had put across to the audience, but the early music crowd thinks you should learn the tune in your recorder group. This was the first setting they played, so I had my group play it. The hard part is finding where the next verse is.

There are also some minor underlay fixes to Come, gentle swains.