Tag: music

They’re having a discussion at the lilypond
users mailing list about how and whether to have a lilypond
mode for entering “ancient” lute tablatures.

Some people seemed to like the idea, but not to have much idea
what the place of lute tablature was in music history, so I
contributed a post. Someone else had written:

I am not at all familiar with these old tablatures, but they
look just amazing, so simply for typographic and aesthetical
reasons, these should be made possible with lilypond.

And I replied:

Actually, there are good musical reasons, too. In the 16th and maybe
most of the 17th, and in some places longer than that, the
dominant instrument which could play many notes at a time, at least in
the home, was the
lute, or various other plucked string instruments which could read the
same tablature.

So this means that lots of the kinds of music which would later be
published with keyboard accompaniment, which lilypond transcribes very
well, was published with lute tablature.

My edition of all the part songs of John Dowland (which
many people think of as lute songs, but most of them are really
accompanied madrigals) is really incomplete, because I’ve
only transcribed the vocal lines, and in general not the lute
tablature.

For a lot of them, the lute tablature is very little different from
just a transcription of the vocal lines, but in others there’s a lot
of decoration.

I’ve made some efforts to transcribe the tablature, but what I want
ideally is to transcribe what’s there, in an input form that doesn’t
require me to translate the tablature into notes, and then use that
transcription plus the tuning of the strings to produce both a
tablature that looks like the one in the facsimile and standard
notation that a modern keyboard player could deal with.

Lute players should note that I’m aware that tablature has different
information from notation: specifically that the beginning time of the
note is specified, but not the length of the note. However, I believe
that good keyboard players are just as capable as lute players of
making the decision about where to end the note; they just aren’t as
capable as players of 6-course fretted instruments of playing
tablature for 6-course fretted instruments.

There’s a red flag in there that I’ve been meaning to address for
some time — there are eminent musicologists who have studied
the period deeply who would disagree with my statement that “most of them are really
accompanied madrigals”. So I’ll tell you why I think that some other time.

One of the problems of sharing music with people who prefer
some other music notation software is that until recently the
best available way to do it was MIDI. MIDI has many fine
qualities, but it doesn’t save the same information that printed
notation needs.

There’s a fairly well-thought-of standard exchange format
called MusicXML. Lots of programs (including lilypond)
implement an import of MusicXML, but export is a lot less
common, so most people (including me) who put their work up on
the web can’t give you MusicXML from their source. Finale users
could, but mostly don’t.

The reason I call it an exchange format is that while it
captures all or most of the information any of the notation
programs save, it doesn’t do it in a way anyone would want to
work with. For instance, here’s the information for one note (a
g quarter note in the second octave above middle C) in
MusicXML:


<note>
<pitch>
<step>G </step>
<octave>5 </octave>
</pitch>
<duration>96 </duration>
<voice>1 </voice>
<type>quarter </type>
<dot/>
<notehead>normal </notehead>
</note>


In lilypond, you would normally enter that “g4” (or just “g” if
it were in a string of other quarter notes) and in ABC it
would usually be “g”. So you can see why people would rather
type ABC or lilypond.

Earlier this week, I wanted to transcribe a piece
by Antony
Holborne. The whole book this piece is in has been
transcribed, and is on the web at the Werner
Icking Archive. But the person who did this did it in a
notation program called Capella 5, which I
don’t have. He did provide sources, as well as PDF and MIDI
files, so I tried importing the MIDI file into lilypond, and
decided it would be easier to just enter the lilypond.

One reason I decided this was that midi2ly had decided to spell
all the MIDI pitches that are a half note below B and a half
note above A as A♯ instead of B♭. (The MIDI format only records
what the pitch is in terms of how many half steps from 0
(roughly the bottom of the piano) it is, it doesn’t know
anything about how a notation system would want to write that
pitch.)

So I was excited when I read in a newsletter from Noteflight that they now
have MIDI import. Noteflight is a web-based notation system
that seemed promising when I looked at it a few months ago, but
hadn’t yet implemented anything I was particularly interested in
using.

So I ran the next of the Holborne MIDI files through it, and
was gratified to see that it spelled the notes between B and A
as B♭ instead of A♯. Unfortunately, it spells the ones between
F and G as G♭ instead of F♯. But you can import the MIDI file,
export the XML file, and import the XML file into lilypond and
get something you can work with more easily in several ways than
the direct import of MIDI into lilypond, which is fairly
orphaned. And it may well be that some of the manipulation
you’re going to have to do to the score can be done more easily
in noteflight than in lilypond, although I can’t tell you that
from personal experience.

So if you’re looking for a web-based music notation software,
or a fairly clean way to get MIDI files into MusicXML, look into
noteflight.

Here’s the Holborne Galliard as I imported it from the MIDI
file. I think the only thing I did was to change the key
signature and edit one G♭ into an F♯.