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Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

You can engrave chant

For longer than a year, I’ve wanted to throw myself into learning Gregorio, the method for setting four-line staffs with chant notation that shows such incredible promise. The merit of it comes down to its stability (if your code is right, the output is perfect), its sharability (one can imagine a global data base of all Gregorian code), its incredibly intuitive structure (there is virtually no way not to follow how it works once you start).

To tell you the truth, I’ve dreaded learning this because I’m not such a quick study when it comes to software and code, despite the reality that I live, eat, and sleep in a world of coders nearly all the time. I’m too impatient for it, and I keep having to learn the same lessons over and over. Learning new stuff, which I have to do every few days in any case, truly does feel painful and I tend to find excuses not to do so. So I put off Gregorio until I could really focus.

Today was the day.

Gregorio lives in that mysterious world inhabited by hypergreeks called LaTeX or just Tex, so this is GregorioTeX. This is method of code writing to a compilier that spits out your end results on the other side. This is very different from a graphic interface program like most music typesetting software and like Word.

Until now, this is all I’ve used. I can type with Meinrad fonts if I just have to, but the program is oddly unstable. Moving from Mac to Windows is nearly impossible, and recent versions of Word have been unkind to systems that require vertical stability across several fonts. In any case, the fonts are no longer being updated or upgraded, so their current limits (some thing this font package just will not do) are permanent.There are a handful of people in the world who can really make Meinrad sing, people like Richard Rice (Parish Book of Chant) who can type as fast with these fonts as the best expert can type words.

But then what about the rest of us? It makes sense to move forward to new things. The Simple English Propers were set in Gregorio, and everyone has been amazed at the results. In fact, it seems that nearly everyone under a certain age is using this new method.

My first mistake with Gregorio was attempting to throw myself into the TeX world at the same time I tried to learn this program. After many downloads, tutorials, customizations, and hours of clumsy poking on things, I finally bailed out. This is a highly frustrating path for anyone who doesn’t do this all the time.

Then I went straight for the wonderful interface built by Richard Chonak: Gregorio live demonstration. He has used his own server to run all the machinery behind the scenes. All you need to do is put in the code right inside the window, choose your export properties, and you are done.

Try it now with this Kyrie

____
name:Kyrie XVII;
%%
(c4)KY(f)ri(gfg)e(h.) *() e(ixjvIH’GhvF’E)lé(ghg’)i(g)son.(f.) bis(::)
Chri(ixj)ste(jv.hijv.) e(ixjvIH’GhvF’E)lé(ghg’)i(g)son.(f.) bis(::)
Ký(f)ri(hj)e(ixjjkij.) e(ixjvIH’GhvF’E)lé(ghg’)i(g)son.(f.) (::)
Ký(f)ri(hj)e(ixjjkij.) *(,) (ixf//hjjkij.) **(,) e(ixjvIH’GhvF’E)lé(ghg’)i(g)son.(f.) (::)
_______

All that is left is understand the logic of the code. Here is the essential guide. You can get more detailed on the next page. It comes down to this: the words are typed and the music is in parenthesis. The notes start with A and go to M.

From there you can create every manner of note shape and compound neume and everything else you can imagine. It is actually completely amazing and very easy once you get the hang of it.

The possibilities here really are incredible to consider. For Church musicians, this is just invaluable for making scores and printing pew resources. I’m imaging a future in which all this code is completely open source. In fact, people like Aristotle Esguerra have already posted the code for the Graduale Simplex. This way, if you need a perfect rendering of Gloria XV, it’s there for the taking.

Here is a bit about the background of the project:

The Gregorio project was born in 2006 at TELECOM Bretagne, a graduate engineering school in France. It was at first a student project of six months duration, supervised by Mr Yannis Haralambous, developer of Omega. When the project was done, Élie Roux decided to continue the project and to develop it under GPL.

From the outset the goal of the project has been to create a graphical interface for the monks of the Abbey of Sainte Madeleine du Barroux so that they could use a gregorian font. This font, Gregoria, is a professional and commercially available OpenType font designed by Elena Albertoni, a typographer and graphic designer. Finally, due to licence issues, it was decided that the project will have its own font called gregorio.

At the end of the year 2006, a new developer, Olivier Berten, joined the project and created its OpusTeX component. By April 2007, Gregorio had reached a certain maturity and could start to be used, at least through its command line interface, as a preprocessor for OpusTeX. A project page was created on gna.org.

This site was set online in April 2007 with a design by Patrick Roux and it has since been corrected and improved by Nicolas Aupetit. Jérémie Corbier has been developing the autotools support and the modularization of the code, also since April 2007.

The development of the graphical interface and the modification of the code structure to use autotools and dynamic libraries has been the subject of my third year project in TELECOM Bretagne. Sadly, the graphical interface is not yet usable.

During a three-month internship starting april 2008 at the Monastero di San Benedetto, in Norcia (Italy), gregorio made considerable progress, The GregorioTeX style is now almost finished, and as a consequence, we’ve made progress in code stabilization. Gregorio is now close to a release.

During the months of October and November 2008, the development is focusing on stabilization for a release. The port to cygwin is working, and the website has been updated and improved. Website development has picked up lately, thanks to Richard Chonak who joined the project as a translator.

Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

How to Sing, from Estonia to Lady Gaga

The Estonia Song Festival is one of the largest amateur singing events in the world. I’m grateful for the youtubes online that give a sense of what goes on there. The newest one apparently took place yesterday.

What I like about this video is that it shows what strong, bold, confident, declamatory singing is like.

Inspired by this video, diversion follows:

Christian liturgical singers could learn something from watching this. The pathetic and insipid stylings of “Christian contemporary” music has infected this generation of singers, so that they come to their Church choirs with that affected, wispy, vulnerable sound that is (I gather) supposed to represent a kind piety. It does not. It suggests something else entirely.

If popular styles eventually make their way into our Churches, and surely they do, there is probably good reason to be optimistic about other changes that are taking place in pop music. The astounding popularity of Lady Gaga here could eventually have a good effect. She rejects that wispy, affected sound completely.

With Lady Gaga, we similarly find this forthright, full-voiced, text-driven declamatory style, an approach that is (ironically) much more suitable for a liturgical approach than what passes for “praise music” today.

An additional interesting fact about Lady Gaga: as the composer of her own music, she is pushed back to a rhythmic style that places the metric emphasis on beats one and three (such as we find in Josquin and Palestrina) rather than on two and four (such as has dominated popular music since the big band age). It is also helpful that despite her obvious shortcomings in the moral area (I can’t even link a video), she is the most articulate pop musician since Benny Goodman, so perhaps she will start something here too: the use of the mind rather than pure emotion.

Indeed, Gaga’s music is complex enough to be fugued:

Posted on by Adam Bartlett

Introducing IMSLP “Padrucci” for iPad

I remember the day that I first discovered the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)–about a month after it was established and launched online–sometime in early 2006. I knew at the time that it was the beginning of something huge.

The mission of IMSLP is “to create a virtual library containing all public domain music, as well as music from composers who are willing to share their work with the world without charge.” What began with a music student in Canada scanning and digitizing public domain scores in his dorm room has grown in five years to a library downloadable sheet music that now includes 39,875 works, 98,278 scores, and 5,748 composers.

While IMSLP’s “Petrucci Music Library” has been an immensely useful tool for research and performance, the mechanics of downloading and printing files remains cumbersome. The traditional method of purchasing clean and durable musical scores and books remains advantageous for a number of reasons.


This is beginning to change though. IMSLP has just recently launched the all-new “Padrucci” app for the iPad. It is currently available for purchase in the App Store for $5.99. Padrucci offers the entire Petrucci Music Library in a single, tablet-based solution. The benefit is obvious: The library of music is no longer a source for printing scores on paper, but is an entire library that is available at your finger tips, ready to be played or sung right from the iPad.

After I discovered this app this afternoon I downloaded it immediately and began to assess the interface and downloaded a few scores. The interface is very tasteful and rather attractive. The primary window lists tabs across the top which list the scores according to historical period, and in each case all of the composers from that period are listed in the main window. Upon selecting a composer you are able to view and download all of the available scores from that composer. Downloading is very quick and painless and the score is automatically added to your personal library on your iPad.


After downloading a few scores I immediately ran to the organ and put the iPad right on the console and began to play through a few pieces of Renaissance organ music. It was such a delight to navigate the score via the iPad, and turning pages is a breeze: a single swipe of the finger. My only real complaint is that the screen on the current iPad is really too small for many of these scores, many of which were notated for sheets of paper much larger than is available on the screen. I didn’t entirely mind it however, and lighting is never an issue since the screen is back-lit and the brightness is controlled by the viewer. I think that this application will be infinitely more useful when the iPad or something like it is eventually released with larger screen sizes.

The application is only a month old, and it is clearly in an early stage of development. There is a tagging feature that does not yet seem to work, and a bookmarking feature which only cause the application to crash the few times I used it. There is important data missing from the interface still. I’m sure that all of this will be implemented/corrected in future releases. I am fine with this though because of my excitement about the potential for this app.

For the price, I would say that this is an essential iPad app for any practitioner of sacred music. It is only going to get better, and purchasing the app may also be support the development effort as it proceeds. Considering the mission of IMSLP, this is an inestimable gift to the Church and to the world. Please consider supporting the IMSLP Petrucci Music Library and all of the fantastic work that they are doing for the good of humanity.