The biggest issue for this would be the fact that gabc and lilypond
notation approach representing music from two different view points.
The different heights (a to m) in gabc represent the actual position of
the neume on the staff, regardless of the clef position. As a result
"g" may correspond to fa, re, ti (or ta), so, mi, or do depending on the
clef (c1, c2, c3 (flatted), c4, f3, or f4). Given that Gregorian chant
uses a movable do, this isn't as illogical as it may sound because one
group may choose different pitches for the same neume on the same clef
in different pieces and different groups may sing the same piece at
different pitches. There really is very little correspondence between a
note's pitch and where it appears on the staff. What matters is the
relation between the notes (the scale) not the actual pitches. In
short: gabc represents the *visual representation* of a chant score
(i.e. what appears in the manuscript), not the musical content.
Lilypond notation, on the other hand, is very much tied to the pitch.
a' (in absolute mode) is A440 and means that regardless of key settings
(relative mode and the transpose function both play with this mapping).
This makes sense because modern music (which Lilypond is designed
around) uses a fixed do. Regardless of who performs a piece, or which
piece a note appears in, the same note represents the same pitch. In
short: lilypond notation represents the *musical content* (i.e. what we
hear), not how it visually appears on the page (position tweaks, stencil
tweaks, etc. excepted).
Any attempt to convert from gabc to lilypond would require bridging that
gap by establishing conventions for how the height of a note on the
staff maps on to a particular pitch. That's not to say that isn't
possible (the visual representation and the musical content are related,
after all, otherwise scores would be meaningless), but it would require
some thinking out and I suspect that not everyone would be satisfied
with any particular solution.
✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝
Br. Samuel, OSB
(R. Padraic Springuel)
PAX ☧ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ
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