[MEI-L] Introduction and engraving/typesetting considerations

[Jürgen Schöpf]

Dear Urs,

also new to the list myself and unexperienced in MEI practice...

Do I get you right you suggest to have an interface from MEI into LaTEX for the
display/printout instead of recreating an output stage to MEI ?
Sorry for getting it perhaps wrong in oversimplifying, am I?

best regards
:-J

> Urs Liska <ul at openlilylib.org> hat am 3. Juli 2014 um 12:01 geschrieben:
>
>
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> mei-l mailing list
> mei-l at lists.uni-paderborn.de
> https://lists.uni-paderborn.de/mailman/listinfo/mei-l
-------------- n�chster Teil --------------
Ein Dateianhang mit HTML-Daten wurde abgetrennt...
URL: <http://lists.uni-paderborn.de/pipermail/mei-l/attachments/20140703/4f87b720/attachment.html>