[MEI-L] Introduction and engraving/typesetting considerations

[Urs Liska]

Dear MEI users,

with this post I would like to introduce myself and to open discussion 
about some thoughts I have written down recently.

I am a pianist, musicologist and, let's say: amateur, programmer, 
strongly interested and involved in musical editing.

As a pianist my most worthwile and characteristic achievement is the 
(first) complete recording of Arnold Schoenberg's songs 
(http://www.schoenberg-lieder.de and 
https://www.youtube.com/user/schoenberglieder).
As a musicologist I'm hoping that my soon-to-be-finished dissertation on 
multiple versions of Schubert songs will add some interesting aspects to 
Schubert research and editing perspectives (in that I'm recently 
exploring the inherent fragmentary character of not-so-few manuscripts).
Not a "project" but a finished task is a (printed) edition of the songs 
of Oskar Fried (http://lilypondblog.org/category/fried-songs/). This is 
not noteworthy because of the "BEST EDITION 2014" it was awarded but 
because it was the trigger, framework and testbed for the development of 
characteristic edition techniques (which starts leading to the actual 
point of this message). Starting with this project I explore and promote 
editorial workflows based on plain text, using (mainly) LilyPond, LaTeX 
and Git (or any other version control system). Over this I have become a 
central member of the LilyPond community and I think it is interesting 
to know that nowadays there is someone who can interface 
LilyPond(/LaTeX) from a user perspective and LilyPond(/LaTeX) from a 
developer perspective with a serious musicological perspective. To learn 
more about that part of my work you may browse our semi-official 
LilyPond blog http://lilypondblog.org.

So far I haven't had any concrete experience with MEI, but my 
participation at the conference on "Digital music edition" which took 
place in Berne last month was the - long-overdue - opportunity to 
actively move into the direction of digital edition concepts. As a 
follow-up of that conference I wrote a paper that you can download at 
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49478835/engraving-in-digital-edition.pdf 
(this is a non-permanent link and may be removed at any time).
On the one hand it summarizes the two talks I gave, and on the other 
hand it integrates my existing knowledge with the new perspectives on 
concretely _digital_ edition concepts I got in Berne. I present it here 
in order to get some feedback, start discussion, and potentially open up 
some perspectives.

As far as I can see (this is actually a preview abstract of the paper) 
there still is some lacking awareness for the _quality_ of typesetting 
and engraving in existing efforts towards digital edition. This is 
completely understandable as there are so many complex issues to deal 
with that it's natural to first concentrate on the aspect of _encoding_ 
and to treat the visualization as a mere necessity. However, I am 
convinced that _professional_ engraving and typesetting should be an 
integral part of digital edition concepts too. For example I see that 
the Reger edition (not MEI, but Edirom based) does contain professional 
engravings of the authoritative text - but these have been created with 
an arbitrary notation program and are only available as PDF files in the 
edition. This is of course against the idea of an "encoding-driven" 
edition concept. On the other hand I am quite sure that developing 
custom "rendering engines" can't reasonably be expected to lead to 
professional results in the foreseeable future. However, plain text 
based tools like LaTeX and LilyPond are conceptually the perfect match 
for the challenge of automatic typesetting/engraving from encoded content.

Therefore I'd argue that it would be better to invest time, energy and 
money in _integrating_ existing professional tools in MEI/Edirom based 
toolchains than in reinventing the wheel by creating "rendering engines" 
from scratch. (Just to say one thing in advance: LilyPond can also be 
made fruitful for interactive applications, as it can natively produce 
scores as SVG files).

I'd be happy about any feedback on my paper. Particularly I'm aware that 
the "analysis" of the current state of digital edition (sections 3.1 and 
3.2) is the weakest part of the argumentation, simply due to my lack of 
first-hand knowledge. I hope this doesn't affect my conclusions but I'd 
be glad to improve the text in this regard.

Best wishes
Urs Liska