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A package for compiling lilypond music notation. Relies on abjad v3.6 and python 3.10

Project is in pre-alpha and under ongoing development.

Introduction

marana is a word in the Irish language that was suggested to me while I was searching for a title for a short piece of orchestral music. I was looking for a way to translate the word meditation, having read that meditation has been used on occasion by some composers as a title for a short orchestral piece. The piece itself was supposed to be written and performed by the NSO in Dublin in 2020. Then covid happened and it's now 2022, so there was plenty of time to contemplate the piece in the interim. If I had wrote the piece in 2020, it would have been difference and this readme would probably not be introducing a more general purpose scripting libary for writing notated music. It's worth noting at the outset that I think that whatever way you approach it, writing music seems to be highly idiomatic. On some level this fact is surprising, largely because of music's universal appeal. Nevertheless, I think it can't be avoided that any approach to writing music will be highly colored by the composer's own particular experience and the ways that they have come to contemplate and imagine the music itself.

usage

To use the main branch of this repository as a python library:

git clone git@github.com:adammccartney/marana
cd marana

Create a virtual environment

python3 -m venv venv
source ./venv/bin/activate

Install the package

(venv) pip install -e .
(venv) pip install -r requirements.txt

examples

If you are like me and rejoice at the thought of an over engineered project, read on to see how to build the examples.

After a few years of working with lilypond and abjad, I've developed my own fairly opinionated approach to how I want to work with both of these tools.

• keep lilypond music data and abjad functions seperate
• retain a clean interface to abjad incase the api changes

I keep any work that relates to a specific score in a separate branch in the repo - at the moment, this means the score-morch branch. It is possible to build the examples by running the following commands:

> cd marana
> git worktree add --track -b score-morch ./examples origin/score-morch  
> cd examples
> make brass
> open build/brass-sketch.pdf