I have a file called playford.abc, which I got from http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~flip/contrib/dance/playford.abc. Unfortunately, it doesn't have any information on who transcribed it, or who owns the copyright, etc.
Does anyone have any idea who wrote it? One of my current projects is to use ABC to generate a dance manual for my local SCA group -- with the goal that I should be able to integrate into the manual the score for the dances, the dance steps, and background information (like a transcription of the dance steps from primary sources, known lyrics for the songs, etc) into the source files, and be able to both print out the manual and play songs from it's ABC representation. As such, I believe that the playford.abc file I have found to be a extremely useful and important *starting point* for my work, but not an end in itself. The work I'm undertaking involves taking the file, updating the notation to be conformant to Standard ABC 1.6, adding dance instructions, reorganizing and standardizing the score to match the structure of the dances as well as each other, proofreading and prooflistening to ensure the music is correct and at the right tempo, etc, etc, etc. I don't plan on limiting myself to Playford -- I hope to include as many pre-17th-century dance sources as I can. It is a lot of work, and the end result may bear little resemblance to what I'm starting with. However, I can't use the file as a starting point and distribute the result unless I am clear on the copyright issue. I intend to make the results of my work available to those who want it, preferably under something like the GPL. So, again, does anyone know who wrote that file? To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
