Re: Engraving essay questions and RFC

[Andrew Hawryluk]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 1:25 AM, Jan Nieuwenhuizen
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Op woensdag 07-10-2009 om 22:18 uur [tijdzone -0600], schreef Andrew
> Hawryluk:
>
>> Have I missed anything?
>> Please discuss?
>
> What about the bland look of the henle 666 edition of the solo cello
> suites compared with baerenreiter's?
>
> For me, this grasps the essence of
>
>   * what is wrong with computer notated music
>
> ie: why the graham's mao did we start this insane job of building
> lilypond? [and why should the reader junk the piece of sh*t she's
> using now to enrgave her scores?], so it sets the stage for
>
>   * why should I care and learn about/use lilypond
>
> It is kind of hard to immediately see what's wrong with the henle
> edition.  Everything looks neat and okay.  Possibly even "better",
> more computerized and thus possibly unescapably more sterile than
> the hand-engraved version.  It really puzzled Han-Wen and me for
> quite a while why computer music notation is bad.  We really wanted
> to fix that, but we first had to find why it's bad.
>
> This intriguing quest[ion] could make someone want to read the rest
> of the essay too.  It now starts off with a nice history of [plate]
> engraving, but why would I want to know or read about that?
>
> This start was part of the talk that Han-Wen and I gave for a while.
> You'll have to note the exact vertical lines (grid-lines, almost)
> that the barlines and individual notes are on.  That's the most
> noticable clue here, which leads to the small note+accidental spacing
> differences and the optical note spacing corrections, that give
> a score a much more lively/alive look, making it also more readable
> and less awkward (esp. the optical spacing).

Thanks, those are good points. Do you have copies of the scores in
question? For the PDF version I'd love to get some scans at 300 or 600
dpi so they could be reproduced at (nearly) full size.

> I'm not sure if you'd want to visually annotate any typography
> errors.  It was possibly a bit awkwardly done, but visual marks
> do make errors immediately clear; much easier than reading text
> and then comparing it to a picture?

Yes, the annotations speed up the reader's job a lot. I also like
seeing the 'unmarked' version to see the effect of those details on
the total impression, so I will play around with that.

> I also like the lyrics benchmarking bit :-)

Do you mean the Schubert (Sängers Morgenlied)?

Speaking of the benchmarking examples, do you (or anyone else) have
PDF versions of the old LilyPond output? (e.g. version 1.4 or 2.1.5?)
I know the odds are low, but if they were easy to find I would use
them.

Thanks again,
Andrew