LilyPond

You may even distribute LilyPond to your students for homework or team work. In Spain, a conservatory already has a proper LilyPond course [6]. At the Badajoz superior conservatory (Spain), Francisco Vila teaches LilyPond. At risk of boring you telling the philosophy of software freedom, I must say that for education I can not see any alternatives... to free software. Furthermore, music typesetting is a common task, popular among students and with an immense value in music education. This is where the GNU LilyPond music typesetter has its place. The group of students which I teach LilyPond to, has to perform a progressive set of engravings, half of which are copied from fixed models, while the second half involves engraving of pieces proposed by themselves and filtered by me. So they have to make one freely chosen part or solo piece for their own instrument, one for another (preferably transposing) instrument, a piano work, a chamber music work, a choral piece with lyrics and an orchestral full score (not complete, only the first two or three pages). Each of the 30 sessions of a course has a theory part which I use to explain the tip of the day, installation and use of convenience environments, and issues such as the free software philosophy. On the practical time I review their works from past week in turn, and we discuss the language and maybe propose improvements to their code. Finally I order them a new homework telling briefly what I want and trying to focus their attention onto the huge official documentation, which is finally in Spanish. Length and complexity of works range from single-line examples showing a real-life application of a construct of the LilyPond language, to full orchestral scores. This approach is the same as the widely used LaTeX typesetting system for scientific books and any complex text. A plain text document contains it all, and the weirdest trick I see on a LilyPond-made score, I could adapt it to my needs just modifying the actual pitches if I can review the code that led to that ...Read More