Re: lilypond-user Digest, Vol 82, Issue 13

[Jonathan Wilkes]

> Message: 5
> Date: Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:36:49 +0200
> From: Joseph Wakeling <address@hidden>
> Subject: Re: Contemporary music documentation
> To: Graham Percival <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> Message-ID: <address@hidden>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> 
> Graham Percival wrote:
> > Those "actual contemporary scores" must be placed in
> the public
> > domain, licensed under Creative Commons, or licensed
> under the GNU
> > FDL.  If you're thinking about an exerpt of
> Shostakovich or Glass,
> > then forget about it.  Blame copyright law[1],
> not me.
> 
> Actually I was thinking of Ferneyhough, but ... :-P
> 
> Anyway, exactly the answer I was expecting.  Not a
> problem -- will just
> have to be inventive with examples.  Thanks for the
> explanation.
> 
> I'll get on with more work/patches (hopefully without DOS
> line-endings...) and we'll see where this goes ...
> 
> > Oh, and make sure you vote for your country's Pirate
> Party.
> > Branches started recently in the UK and Canada, so
> I've got my
> > next elections' votes lined up.  ;)
> 
> :-)
> 
> Best wishes,
> 
>     -- Joe

I was surprised to see that someone has made a pdf of John Cage's 
"Notations."  Some of the overarching techniques I see are:
* angular and squiggly lines in the staff to denote general pitch content
* angular and squiggly lines outside the staff
* grace notes without heads, slash through the left corner of beamed 
grace notes
* feathered beams that swell in the middle of the beam group
* long horizontal lines, both outside the staff, and inside the staff 
following a notehead to show the duration
* lots of different arrows, brackets and boxes that go around notes, 
staves, staff groups, and other parts of the score
* text in between staves, systems, in margins, with bounding boxes, etc., 
* text rotated 90 degrees

Btw- what do you call the little signature that is rotated 90 degrees and 
put to the right of the final barline?  It's usually the composer's 
signature and the date (and sometimes the name of the city where the piece was 
written).  There should be a way to specify that in the \header block 
if there isn't already.

There's also a lot of creative placement of text.  Of course if you were 
to notate one of the purely textual pieces you probably would be better 
off using another piece of software, but it would still be nice to have 
a guide to controlling vertical text placement for a title page.

-Jonathan