LayMusic.org

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.)

The thread has continued; see the
mailing list archives for further discussion.

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.

The new Dowland,
Where
Sinne sore wounding,
is the original key. We tried it both a third
down
and a fourth
down, since in the original key the cantus part goes up to high a,
which is clearly unsuitable for our group.

Several people brought up notation issues:

• At her fringe
  concert on Wednesday morning, Judith
  Conrad spoke of the difficulty in playing 17th and 18th century
  keyboard music from modern editions for organ on a clavichord without
  pedals. The facsimiles apparently are printed on two staves like
  modern piano music, and may or may not have an indication of which
  voices to play on the pedals. The modern editions for organists
  insist on putting the voices they play on the pedals of a modern organ
  onto a third staff, which may make it some easier for someone playing
  an organ with pedals, but makes it harder for anyone playing an
  instrument without them.
• At the same concert, Dr. Stuart
  Frankel gave it as his opinion that people had not in fact played
  from keyboard tablature, but used it as a convenient shorthand for
  notating ideas arrived at at the keyboard. He based this on his
  observation that the existing keyboard music from the 18th century
  which is in staff notation has drips of candle wax and spilled liquids
  on it, but surviving tablature is comparatively pristine.
• At her masterclass, Ellen
  Hargis discussed the problem of singers’ deciding where to breath in
  long florid passages. She believed that the regular beaming of notes
  in modern editions makes the problem harder, as the beams obscure the
  shape of the melody, and she urged people doing their own editions to
  avoid beaming which doesn’t occur in the original editions.
• I wasn’t there, but several people told me that John Tyson at his workshop and
  concert, plugged this site
  as one of the best sources of Renaissance music in existence based on
  the provision of unbarred parts and original beamings in legible,
  modern clefs.

I don’t remember this much discussion of notation at previous
BEMF’s. So maybe what I’m doing is really on the cutting edge and
everybody will be doing it that way any minute now.