17th February 2025

Coming Soon - "Scores from Scratch"

If you've read previous entries in this blog, you'll know that my score editor of choice is Lilypond. You'll also know that my area of expertise is multiple percussion. Strangely enough, I rarely discuss the intersection of the two, despite having spent nearly ten years exploring this intersection. My doctoral dissertation consisted of the adaptation of John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano for solo multiple percussion.

Multiple percussion is a weird instrument. Its nebularity is appealing, as anything goes. However, when it comes to writing about it, there is a disturbing lack of boundaries on which to grasp. Simply compare the number of multiple percussion method books with those for keyboard percussion.

To help address the imbalance somewhat, I'm going to be presenting some videos on multiple percussion score presentation using Lilypond. These will show how to create scores in the style of some of the more famous multiple percussion works. To avoid any copyright issues, I'm going to borrow a trick from John Cage, and use chance operations to alter them enough to avoid any publisher wrath.

Once the chance operations have been completed, I'll show a hand-written version of the fragment that I'll attempt to recreate. Then I'll highlight the "challenging areas", and will go through them one at a time, building up the score gradually.

If I successfully overcome any challenges, then I should have a digital recreation of the hand-written fragment. The viewer can then use this to either recreate the original score, or to write their own music using the notational layout as a framework. It's a great way to learn about Lilypond, and I'm looking forward to picking up some new tricks along the way!

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