Re: Openlilylib snippets announcement

[Trevor Bača]

On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 11:03 AM, SoundsFromSound <address@hidden> wrote:

Trevor Bača-2 wrote

And as a brief aside - if I may say so - Trevor, thank YOU so much for all
the work you have put (and still put) into Abjad.

I use it all the time. I use it in almost every composition. It's the first
thing I go to when preparing a new piece, and for getting a lot of options
in front of me. Nothing "algorithmic", just pure boatloads of options.

I love being able to create structure, set some boundaries, and then get a
ton of inspiration from Abjad in a matter of hours instead of months. Such
an amazing, powerful utility - and thanks for doing it in Python too :)

I love the direction that Abjad is going...hope it keeps on going strong!

Ben

Thanks, Ben! Those are kind words. And -- even more excitingly -- it's awesome to hear that you're getting legit compositional use outta Abjad! This has been the point the whole time: to make intermediate-level compositional ideas (ie, above notation but below the level of complete score) easier to model and -- ultimately -- enjoy while composing.

Abjad is still very much going strong: Josiah (Oberholtzer) and I both have many features in development branches waiting to be merged into main for Abjad 2.20. Among them: automated set-class analysis with a new SetClass object; compoundable twelve-tone operators; new Markup methods to better complement the LilyPond markup functions; a powerful façade pattern for persisting arbitrary compositional expressions to file; smarter item-indexing in the LilyPondFile object; and many more.

After more than a decade, the decision to implement Abjad in Python continues to wear very well. And although Abjad and LilyPond are architected differently, it's exciting to see LilyPond Python updates as an active topic on the LilyPond dev list again.

Every score I've written for more than 10 years now has been 100% Abjad plus LilyPond. At almost every rehearsal, musicians complement the clarity of the LilyPond-rendered scores and parts. And the compositional working pattern feels stronger and stronger every couple of weeks. In 2017 the goal will be to make Abjad increasingly easy to get started with: more cookbook-style documentation is coming up, as well as in-real-life camps and workshops throughout the year that I'll be hosting together with Josiah and Jeff Treviño.

Thanks for the feedback, and happy modeling and composing!

Trevor.

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Trevor Bača

www.trevorbaca.com

soundcloud.com/trevorbaca