Hi,
I have a problem with PMX. The d-minor organ concerto (BWV146/1052)
of Bach contains in the third movement many arpeggio-like triplet passages
starting with a rest. This motif is not rare in keyboard
music at all. However, I get the error message
``Xtuplets may not start with a rest!''. How can I circumvent that?
Since it occurs so often, I would have to write long passages entirely
in MusixTeX and \input it.
As a matter of fact, I had to do that also for 30 bars in the first movement
because PMX was unable to beam together rapidly alternating right-hand/
left-hand beats, another frequent feature of keyboard music. The way PMX
printed it with separate flags, the music was too difficult to read.
Actually,
the code for MusixTeX was even not very complicated because of its superior
ability to save time and increase accuracy by using macros.
Another feature would have been also extremely helpful for setting
the concerto: It continuously runs over the entire 4 1/2 octavas
of the organ manual. Frequent clef changes are necessary unless one uses
the trick which is used in traditional note-setting:
The minimum space between the staves is exactly one interspace.
In this way, passages automatically enter bass notes that exceed
the pitch range at the correct place in the treble stave and
vice versa. However, I could not use it because there is no way
to suppress drawing of the help lines. Actually, this is also a feature which
occurs quite frequently in other keyboard music.
I realize that a preprocessor cannot provide all features.
I like PMX and M-Tx very much, because
it really speads up setting. However, in all cases of more
sophisticated music I found no way to avoid extensive editing of the
TEX-file. Actually, I have the impression, the beauty of the note-setting
is too much in the foreground. The philosophy of LATeX, to do everything to
make reading easy, if necessary even at the expense of beauty, is even
more important for a practising musician where scores must be entirely
lucid to speed up reading which is often the rate-limiting step in performance.
There is good reason that professional musicians do avoid reading
altogether when interpreting.
In M-TX there is an item missing which should not be too
difficult to implement: There should be a way to transmit
TeX-commands that are defined before MusixTeX starts its work.
PMX has this feature by the --- inserts, but I was unable
to transmit it from M-Tx to PMX. M-Tx uses the feature
itself, so it should be possible to add something to the preamble
without having to edit the PMX-file.
I appreciate all helpful comments!
Christof.
Prof. Dr. Christof K. Biebricher
Max-Planck-Inst. for Biophysical Chemistry
D-37070 G"ottingen
phone: +49 (551) 201-1442
