Two new Gibbons pieces

[publishing] Two new Gibbons pieces

Bonnie Rogers has been transcribing pieces from “The First Set of Madrigals and Mottets of 5.Parts:
apt for Viols and Voyces. 1612” by Orlando Gibbons. This is the same
collection that The Silver Swan comes from. There are two of them up with transpositions to fit our vocal ranges: Daintie fine Bird, which we think will fit in a set with “The Silver Swan”, and What is our Life?

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Laura Conrad

Last modified: Wed Mar 15 09:54:52 EST 2006

Added Certon

[publishing] Added “Jai le rebours”

I added J’ai
le rebours, by Pierre
Certon (c. 1510 – 1572). I’m using this as ornamentation
practice for my recorder lessons, and practicing with the MIDI
file. We did it with the Renaissance
Band on Tuesday and enjoyed it, although there weren’t
quite enough people.

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Laura Conrad

Last modified: Fri Mar 3 11:23:56 EST 2006

Gabrielli two-choir piece

[publishing] Gabrielli two-choir piece

When I started the Renaissance band, one of the things I advertised
that we were going to do was Gabrielli, that being the
Renaissance music that brass players are most likely to wish
they had a lot of brass players to play with.

Unfortunately, the group never really attracted a lot of brass
players, so we didn’t really end up doing a lot of Gabrielli.
But one of the group members (Bonnie Rogers) played a two choir Gabrielli with a
(mostly) recorder group, and transcribed it for the group.

We did actually have nine people once at the Renaissance band, and
did it with a recorder choir and an “other” choir (we had me on
serpent, a fiddle, an oboe and a singer), and it was lots of
fun. So if you’re in the mood for Gabrielli two-choir pieces in
unbarred parts, here’s one to try: Canzon
Septimi toni a 8, from from Sacrae Symphoniae (1597).

I seem to be getting some energy for putting up the stuff we’ve
been doing that doesn’t quite fit the normal scripts I run to
get things into the database and onto the site. This one is
abnormal because the two choirs got transcribed separately and
combined manually.

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Laura Conrad

Last modified: Sat Feb 18 16:28:01 EST 2006

New printing of Morley Canzonets for two voices

[publishing] New printing of Morley Canzonets for two voices

New stuff hasn’t been appearing here at the usual rate, because I’m
behind in redesigning the database and the supporting code. But
I did find two transcription errors in the oldest major project
on the site — the Morley Canzonets for Two
Voices, so those are fixed.

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Laura Conrad

Last modified: Fri Feb 17 09:12:02 EST 2006

The group has
been busy with gigs, so the transcribing has slowed down a little, and
the publishing had ground to a halt. But I’m trying to catch up.

• Il Bianco
  e dolce Cigno, by Guidiccioni is a two part arrangement of the
  same text as the Arcadelt
  and Vecchi
  settings, closely related to The
  Silver Swan.

• The current gig
  is pre-performance music for a Shakespeare play, and we were asked to
  play Greensleeves, so I did several related things, including
  Bransle
  de la Torche. This is a closely related tune, which we play as an
  interlude between verses on 5 recorders.

• I’ve been playing some of the Bicinia with my recorder teacher, so I added Fantasia
  18 by Giovanni
  de Antiquis.
• I’ve finally convinced one of the people I play with to learn ABC
  and help out on the transcriptions. So we’ll now have music
  transcribed by Bonnie Rogers, as well as by me. She’s done several
  things:
  • I care
    not for these Ladies, which we’re doing in the dance set at the
    play.
  • Several Rounds by Thomas
    Ravenscroft:
    • Oken
      Leaves
    • Hey Ho,
      to the Greenwood
    • Three Blinde Mice

Where most groups have fewer meetings or fewer people per meeting,
the Cantabile
Renaissance Band, as a dropin group, sometimes gets more people
coming in August when other groups shut down. So the addition this
week is another Anthony
Holborne 5-part dance piece called Muy
Linda.

The newsgroup rec.music.theory has a thread about comparing music
typesetting programs. They set the same one-page guitar score in all
the programs. They started with 6 commercial programs, and
got subsequent contributions of one more commercial program and
lilypond. The links to the pdf’s are:

• Original
  6 programs
• 
  Mozart
• lilypond 2.4.5

  Update: the source for this lilypond
  implementation was subsequently posted to the lilypond list and links
  to
  couple of improved versions were posted:

  • 2.4.5 with
    better titling fonts.

  • 2.6
  • 2.7.5
    prerelease, with spacing bugfix by Han-Wen

The discussion is at google
groups link.

Because of the maintainability issues with lilypond (see this
entry for a discussion), I’m looking into whether there’s another
option for future publishing activity.

My publishing history

I thought TeX was the coolest program I’d ever heard of when I
first heard of it in 1981, and I wished there was something like that
for music.

When I heard of Musixtex in 1994, I tried using it. I could write
it ok, but reading it made my head ache, and I didn’t see any good way
to do lyrics.

When I got a Linux machine in 1995, I tested out all the open source
music publishing programs I could find, and by that time there was pmx
and musixlyr to help with reading the input and writing the lyrics,
but installing them was really hard. So I ended up using ABC, which
is really readable and anyone who wants to spend 10 minutes can
install it on any computer with a C compiler. (Yes, I have friends who
claim to be really interested in doing music typesetting who haven’t
spent the 10 minutes, but I suppose all hobbies have people like that.)

When I got abc2ly working, I started using lilypond as a backend to my
abc input instead of the abc*2ps jungle. This looked like it was
working, but unfortunately the half-life of lilypond code seems to be
about 2 years. Which would be OK if I were only using the features
that abc and abc2ly support, but I’ve been hand-editing the lilypond
files to take advantage of features not available in ABC. The typical
Serpent Publications project takes about a year for the initial
data-entry and proofreading phase, and may take much longer until the
final editing, and if it’s part of a larger sequence like the
Dowlands, a 5-year project lifespan isn’t unreasonable. And in any
case, one reason for electronic publishing is so that you can produce the
pdf’s you need today, not the ones you needed 3 years ago. So having
orphaned code around is not a good thing.

So yesterday when I discovered that lilypond 2.6.3 seems to be
completely broken (bug
report) on my system, I decided to see where the musixtex stuff
had gotten to.

musixtex testing

It installs a lot easier (at least on Debian) than it did in 1995.
There are packages for the basics, so “apt-get install m-tx musixlyr
musixtex musixtex-slurps pmx” gets you started, with documentation and
everything.

My first idea was to check out some of Christian Mondrup’s current
stuff and see if I could modify it to get unbarred parts instead of
barred scores.

I immediately found that the installation for printing actual work
isn’s as easy as just running apt-get, because people actually use a
lot of TeX stuff that isn’t in the distribution. Fortunately,
Christian is pretty meticulous about uploading what he uses.
Installing it does involve knowing some things about how your TeX
distribution sets up its directories, which I’m sure I didn’t know in
1995, but I mostly do now, and I recorded what I did (in a makefile)g
so I can do it again fairly easily if I have to.

The parts part is
easy — the Vecchi madrigal
I was looking at is written as an abcpp macro file which allows either
score or parts to be printed.

Unfortunately, somewhere at the M-TX or PMX level, something is
really barline dependant. I was able to get the list to tell me how
to turn printing the barlines off (and turn it back on again, which
you need to do for even a repeat sign). But typing anything where the
notes cross the barlines is going to be a real nuisance — you have to
use cryptic pmx syntax to change the length of the bar every time it
happens. lilypond and abc applications are usually not well-designed
for printing good output where all the notes cross the barlines, but
the input is no problem. In ABC if you don’t want a barline, you just
don’t write one, and I have abc2ly set up so that the default barline
is “empty”, and if you write a barline it becomes a normal barline.

There is a concept of an empty barline in pmx, but there doesn’t
seem to be a way to tell it that that’s the default kind. And in any
case, it can’t deal with a note that has a barline in the middle of
it, so to write a whole note that crosses the barline, you have to
tell it that the measure before and after are different lengths.

Now I’m sure it’s possible to define emacs macros or or some kind of
preprocessor program so that typing this isn’t as big a pain as it is
for the novice, but it does seem that this is defeating some of the
purpose of typesetting barline-independant stuff.

On the good side, I can report that fiddling with the layout is a lot
easier than it is with lilypond. The typing is pretty easy, and M-TX
plus PMX is no less readable than ABC or lilypond. I don’t yet know
how to do some of the things like ambits that I use lilypond for, but
I’m sure it’s possible. I haven’t played with the MIDI generation,
but it doesn’t seem to be a problem for the people who use it. There
is some kind of lute tablature, but I haven’t looked at it yet. The
figured bass support is good.

I’m also having enough trouble typing one line with Renaissance
rhythms that I’m not sure what it’s going to be like telling it
there’s a 4 or 5 line score with barlines in different places, so I’d
definitely want to test that out. I’m not sure what route I’d take
to get the score and parts. Christian seems excited about abcpp, but
he might be mostly entering things that are already in score.

So it isn’t out of the question to switch to using musixtex, but it
isn’t a no-brainer, either.

Future plans

It looks like I won’t have time to set an M-TX piece in time for
Tuesday’s rehearsal. But I want to look into it more. But sometime in
the near future I will either set a piece of my own or modify one from the
web so that it meets my minimum standards and see what the group members (and
the blog readers) think.

I will also look into the lute tab stuff to see if it’s easier to get
what i want that way than by beating assistance out of the lilypond
list. (I forgot to mention that the tone on the musixtex list seems a
lot more civilized than the one on the lilypond list. But it’s a lot
lower volume, and googling is a lot less useful. And the manuals
aren’t indexed.)

I’ll also download a sample of stuff from the internet and see if
the stability is as advertised in real-world examples.