piano music with lilypond

[michael.strebl]

Hi,

I want to share some thoughts about piano music with you.

For many years I have been using Score/WinScore for writing music. Since my main interest is the piano I wrote a lot of piano scores.

The learning curve of Score is steep but once you get used to it, it will enable you to produce really beautiful and perfect piano scores with .. lets say, medium effort, regardless if the score is easy, or complex or even very complex.

As most of you may be aware, piano music can be very very complex. I’m not talking about contemporary music, but if you look into piano music from Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, Scrijabin etc. you can see that the requirements of this music in the view of notation are extremely high.

I list here some of these complexities and I do not pretend for completeness, just to give you an impression what a piano-score-writer has to struggle with

-       Multiple voices (up to 4 in 1 staff), either temporary or consistent via the entire score, voices can also contain cords up to 6 notes and a lot of accidentals.

-       Cross staff beaming

-       Cross staff ties

-       Cross staff slurs

-       Multiple slurs beginning on one note

-       Ties from one voice to another

-       Temporary staffs ( piano music may be notated temporary on 3 staffs or even 4 staffs -> look Rachmaninovs famous c#minor prelude )

-        …

Of course I’m aware that most ( not all! ) of these issues can be realized with lilypond …

Some months ago I started to use lilypond . At first I tried it with some Madrigals from the 16^th century and I really was very impressed. Especially from the Feta font which is the best notation font I’ve ever seen. It is superior to those of Finale, Sibelius and I have to admit, even Score. The learning curve of lilypond is steep, but if one create choir- or orchestral- or chambermusic- scores it does a great and with some tweaks a perfect job.

Things got different when I tried my first piano piece ( jazz, piano solo ). And believe me, I tried hard and often. Tried different approaches on the same piece, but ….

Lilypond does in my opinion ~70% perfect job, but takes too much control. The score looks pretty beautiful at the first glance, but to make it perfekt and complete, you would need such a lot of tweaks or even know how about how to create scheme functions just to get more control over what lilypond does with the output. So the effort for tweaking exceeds the effort you have in Score by far.

I am a software developer and have know how about C/C++ and Java but I’m not willing to learn a new programming language just for the sake of music notation.

My impression is, that lilypond is designed for choir-, orchestral- and chambermusic- scores, even the approach of how music is entered, shows that. And that is a real pity. I would very much like to switch completely to lilypond, but as long as the effort for piano music is such high I  will/have to stay on Score for that.

Are there any plans on facilitate the engraving of piano music? If yes I would like to volunteer for input, feedback or more, because I still think that lilypond has the potential to become the best music engraving tool the world has ever seen ;-), it has already overtaken Finale and Sibelius even Score except piano music. Let me here your feedback on that.

Kind regards

Michael