[LAU] Notation: The State of the Mess

Stephen Doonan stephen.doonan at gmail.com
Sun Sep 7 16:05:51 EDT 2008


Grammostola Rosea wrote:

> Edit: another reason to learn lilypond is the fact that it is able to 
> handle notation, drum notation and tablature. I think there is no 
> notation editor on linux (with gui) which can do that.


I love LilyPond and notated several piano pieces with it. It is very 
logical, very full-featured, and does produce beautiful scores.

However, I stopped trying to notate with LilyPond because of the absence 
of one single feature--

In piano music and music for other polyphonic instruments, it is common, 
in order to create a score that is less cluttered and easy to read, to 
split a polyphonic voice (a voice that can contain chords instead of a 
single note) into two or more voices, and to combine two or more voices 
into a single voice. Sometimes this addition or subtraction of voices is 
sudden and may last only a very brief time--perhaps not even a full measure.

The problem with this and LilyPond has to do with ties (tied notes). 
When I used LilyPond (a couple years ago) it was very difficult and 
required rather complex coding to make even a single tie extend from one 
voice to another. When the complexity of voices that merge and split at 
arbitrary times was added, it was virtually impossible to write LilyPond 
code that would add the necessary ties between the identical notes in 
other voices.

This one thing has been disappointing enough to me during these last 
couple years to keep me away from LilyPond, although I have checked its 
development from time to time. I volunteered to help sponsor (fund the 
programming of) this feature several times, but neither other users nor 
the lead developer, Han-Wen Nienhuys, responded to that suggestion, 
although Han-Wen had incorporated some rather complex code regarding 
ties that I had volunteered to sponsor some months earlier.

I think that LilyPond is an extraordinary, great program and that 
Han-Wen is a brilliant programmer. However, if one's interest is in 
notating polyphonic music, this issue becomes an obstacle that is 
impossible to ignore and hard to work around.

However, all that said, I would be thrilled to be proven wrong. :-)

Steve



More information about the Linux-audio-user mailing list