LayMusic.org

In a previous
entry, I had lamented the fact that I hadn’t come up with a
plausible set of words for van Eyck’s En fin
l’Amour. One of the places I reported having looked was in Ruth
van Baak Griffioen’s book about van Eyck, and she read the blog and
wrote me the following explanation:

About the mention on your site of the facsimile of a setting of the
“En fin l’amour” tune in the Van Eyck book: the reason I did not
translate the Dutch text for that song is because the Dutch text is
just a text found in a Dutch songbook along with instructions to sing
it to the tune “En fin la’mour”. But that Dutch text has no actual
relation to the original French text; it’s not a translation of it,
or a paraphrase. If Van Eyck had chosen to identify the tune by this
or any other Dutch contrafactum text, I would have provided a
translation. But Van Eyck refers to the song by the French original,
and that text hasn’t been found (yet). I only translated the Dutch
texts when they matched the title used in Der Fluyten Lust-hof, and
the reason is that once you simply pick one contrafactum text like
the one shown in the facsimile, you’re into a pretty random selection
criterion. For example, look at the top of page 173, just to the
right of the facsimile you mention: a dozen or so *other* Dutch
contrafactum texts are listed, all of which were meant to be sung to
the “En fin” tune. Again, Van Eyck’s piece is known by the French
‘ancestor’ text to all of those, not to any of the Dutch knock-off
texts. Almost every one of the songs on which the Lust-hof
variations are based have anywhere from a handful to a hundred of
such contrafactum possibilities, so the only really sensible way to
go about providing texts is to give the ones that match the title Van
Eyck uses, or sometimes a 17th-c singable direct Dutch translation
thereof. Hope this explains why I left off the Dutch translation
you wanted to have! It’d kind of be like printing the text to “Mine
eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school” when what was
really meant was the actual original “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Or, even more directly, any one, say, of a hundred French social
satire song texts meant to be sung to that tune, none of which had
anything to do with the Civil War or the Second Coming and none of
which became well-enough known to supplant the title “The Battle
Hymn…”

Sorry for the long explanation; I didn’t have time to write a short one.

Dowland

The newest from the Pilgrim’s Solace is “My heart and tongue were
twins.” It’s a really nice one, and not as difficult as some of the
other recent ones.

We did it a fourth down from the original key.

Isaac

We’ve been doing these as relaxing things for the end of a hard
rehearsal for quite a while, but for some reason they didn’t make it
to the web until today.

“Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen” is well-known to most church
musicians as a hymn tune; here’s Isaac’s original setting, and a
double canon version.

Gervaise

We enjoyed the Bransles de Champaigne so much that I did “Dix
Bransles Gays” from the same book.

Sermisy

This is another one that I did some years ago, and just got around
ot putting up on the web now. John Tyson uses the tune to “Tant que Vivrai” with his
students for ornamentation practice. So I’d entered it so that I
could use the MIDI file to practice with, but never fixed up the word
underlay to upload it.

I decided it was taking too much mental energy thinking about whether
to convert to 2.6 from 2.0, and I should just decide to do it or not
do it.

So I picked two pieces, one vocal, and the other a dance, both
unbarred parts.

The dance piece converts without problems, but looks close to
identical in both versions. You can see if you agree, but I don’t see
any compelling reason to do a lot of work to go from this
to
this.

For the vocal piece, using abc2ly directly on the ABC works pretty
well, except that some of the lilypond snippets I have in %%ly
directives in the ABC need to be changed. However, I immediately
found a major problem with printing a second verse if you use
convert-ly on the lily 2.0 abc2ly output. So it isn’t really an
option to just switch to 2.6 and convert the previous pieces in a
large book. When I reported this as a bug, I was told something close
to that convert-ly doesn’t convert lyrics between 2.0 and 2.6.
(Actual email from Eric Sandberg: addlyrics (2.0) is converted to oldaddlyrics, which is strongly deprecated,
and pretty unsupported. It is known that it sometimes doesn’t work.

There is no good automated way to convert from oldaddlyrics to lyricsto, so
I’m afraid you’ll have to fix it manually.)

This suggests that the Dowlands and Morleys are probably never
going to make it to 2.6. Maybe the next big project. But it does
mean that I have to keep a 2.0 environment working.

So I would say that the only obvious advantage to me of 2.6 over
2.0 is the unicode support, which is only important if I do more
Polish music, which I don’t really have any plans for. The default
font for printing lyrics has changed, and I suppose I could get used
to it, but I can’t say it bowls me over with its elegance. You can
see the difference if you look at
the
2.0 output
and
the
2.6 output.

There have been major changes to the underlying technology between 2.0
and 2.6. TeX is no longer the underlying layout engine, and lily is
producing its own postscript. So given this, it’s actually pretty
amazing that more things haven’t broken. But since I have TeX
installed and working well on my system, that isn’t really a reason
for me to change. Previously I’ve been motivated to do all the work
that converting both the lilypond source and the scripts that produce
the lilypond source by the promise of better looking music at the end
of the tunnel, but I don’t see that I have that in this case.

So until someone shows me a compelling reason to do otherwise, the
Serpent
Publications production environment is going to remain on 2.0.

I do have a script that allows me to test the current CVS version
of lilypond. When I’m feeling virtuous about contributing to open
source software, I will continue to smoketest the abc2ly and
convert-ly scripts to make sure they aren’t obviously broken. And
maybe this will show me that there are benefits to some future version
of lilypond that justify the conversion pain.