lilypond-essay: The LilyPond story
1.1 The LilyPond story
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Long before LilyPond had been used to engrave beautiful performance
scores, before it could create university course notes or even simple
melodies, before there was a community of users around the world or even
an essay on music engraving, LilyPond began with a question:
Why does most computer output fail to achieve the beauty and
balance of a hand-engraved score?
Some of the answers can be found by examining the two scores below. The
first score is a beautiful hand-engraved score from 1950 and the second
is a modern, computer-engraved edition.
Bärenreiter BA 320, ©1950:
[png]
Henle no. 666, ©2000:
[png]
The notes here are identical, taken from Bach’s first Suite for solo
cello, but the appearance is different, especially if you print them out
and view them from a distance. (The PDF version of this manual has
high-resolution images suitable for printing.) Try reading or playing
from each of the scores and you will find that the hand-engraved score
is more enjoyable to use. It has flowing lines and movement, and it
feels like a living, breathing piece of music, while the newer edition
seems cold and mechanical.
It is hard to immediately see what makes the difference with the
newer edition. Everything looks neat and tidy, possibly even “better”
because it looks more computerized and uniform. This really puzzled us
for quite a while. We wanted to improve computer notation, but we first
had to figure out what was wrong with it.
The answer lies in the precise, mathematical uniformity of the newer
edition. Find the bar line in the middle of each line: in the
hand-engraved score the position of these bar lines has some natural
variation, while in the newer version they line up almost perfectly.
This is shown in these simplified page layout diagrams, traced from the
hand-engraved (left) and computer-generated music (right):
[png]
In the computer-generated output, even the individual note heads are
aligned in vertical columns, making the contour of the melody disappear
into a rigid grid of musical markings.
There are other differences as well: in the hand-engraved edition the
vertical lines are all stronger, the slurs lie closer to the note heads,
and there is more variety in the slopes of the beams. Although such
details may seem like nitpicking, the result is a score that is easier
to read. In the computer-generated output, each line is nearly
identical and if the musician looks away for a moment she will be lost
on the page.
LilyPond was designed to solve the problems we found in existing
software and to create beautiful music that mimics the finest
hand-engraved scores.
Info Catalog
lilypond-essay: Music engraving
lilypond-essay: Engraving details