Hello Ádám, > My first and maybe most important question is: how many staffs can I use > in a score? In the documentation there was a limit of 9 instruments, > which is a very hard limitation. This limit has been reached centuries > ago (for example, in the motet "Spem In Allium" by Tallis there are 40 > voices), and my biggest orchestral piece up to now was written for 22 > instruments (some of them with more than one staff), so I would be in a > deep trouble if I couldn't use more than 9 instruments. The question is > related to the instrument groups, too. I saw that there's a restriction > of 3 instrument groups at the same time, which is extremely slight. This > number could be easily exceeded already in a baroque score (for example, > in Bach's cantatas or passions)...
Now, instruments number limit has been relaxed in experimental level. I made an extension macro for this purpose. If you are interested, please visit http://homepage1.nifty.com/kuuku/pub/musixtex/index-e.html and see musixuad section (and others). musixuad supports 24 instruments (it's ready to enlarge). However, there is no preprocessor which supports such many instruments. So you are to write your masterpiece in raw MusiXTeX syntax. I guess it may be very hard work under the present situation. I think MusiXTeX is capable to be a "printing workman's tool"; it can produce very beautiful typesetting result. MusiXTeX is a GNU GPL based open-source software thus everybody can make and add such new functions. Everything can be done with the TeX language. However, MusiXTeX is not a "composer's notepad" at present; it requires coding many lines or making new fonts to realize currently unsupported features. Of course all TeXnicians on this list watched your mentions about lackness of MusiXTeX; in future contributors will make MusiXTeX more useful tool. Best regards, ---- Hiroaki MORIMOTO <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Tokyo, Japan Siska Ádám <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello, > > > I'm a hungarian composer student and I'm looking for a professional > score editor software instead of the one I'm using at this moment, and I > would be very glad if someone on this list could help me in my decision. > > The two most frequently used score typesetters are Sibelius and Finale, > but as a LaTeX-user (I wouldn't say I'm a TeXpert, but I use simple > LaTeX for 3 years for typeset normal text documents), I don't like very > much the WYSWYG editors, so I would really like to use MusiXTeX, if it > can deal with the problems that contemporary music typesetting holds. > But after reading the documentation of T.113 (July 30, 2005), I got a > bit disappointed. My first impression was that it would be almost > impossible to typeset not only contemporary scores, but classical ones > written after 1900 too (like for example Stravinsky's Threni, or the > Cello concerto of the recently died Ligeti). But because I REALLY want > to use something related to TeX for typesetting my own scores, I thought > I'll write some questions to this list, to see clearly if I > misunderstood things while reading the documentation or not. Of course I > don't need at this moment a "correct" answer (that means, a long answer > saying how to solve the given problem), only something like "yes, this > can be solved" or "no, forget to use MusiXTeX if you want to do such > things". Thank you. > > My first and maybe most important question is: how many staffs can I use > in a score? In the documentation there was a limit of 9 instruments, > which is a very hard limitation. This limit has been reached centuries > ago (for example, in the motet "Spem In Allium" by Tallis there are 40 > voices), and my biggest orchestral piece up to now was written for 22 > instruments (some of them with more than one staff), so I would be in a > deep trouble if I couldn't use more than 9 instruments. The question is > related to the instrument groups, too. I saw that there's a restriction > of 3 instrument groups at the same time, which is extremely slight. This > number could be easily exceeded already in a baroque score (for example, > in Bach's cantatas or passions)... > > The other thing that was not clear for me, if I could insert graphical > elements in the score. Specially, I don't know if I can draw a free line > within the staff (what normally is used to indicate that the player > should play free notes), or if I can put some notes from several staffs > (staffs that are close to each other, of course) in a squared or circled > box (this is normally used when some instruments have notes that should > be repeated undefined times while the rest of the orchestra is playing), > or things like these. > > The next question is: what happens, if I need to use a musical symbol > that is not included in the MusiXTeX fonts? (For example, I hadn't find > the 1/4 note flat and 1/4 note sharp symbols, nor the symbol indicating > a cluster to be played, etc.). > > It is not clear, that how could I typeset music with non-diatonic > scales, because of the signature setting method of MusiXTeX (\setsign > and \generalsignature commands). This is not a real problem for typeset > contemporary music (because signatures are no longer used, since they > lost their meaning), but if I want for some reason (let say, because I > must write an analysis or anything) typeset scores from classical > composers like Bartók, I can have problems with this system because > there are scores where I must put a sharp and a flat signature in the > same staff (for example, when you use the spectral scale based on C, you > usually write F sharp and B flat as signature, so you have a sharp and a > flat in the same staff at the same time). Or sometimes composers used > signatures like one flat, but instead of putting it to B, they put it on A. > > There is an other problem with the font and paper sizes. The biggest > score I've ever seen in my life is Peter Eötvös's Psychokosmos, > typesetted for paper of size A2, but the usually papersize that > everybody uses in orchestral typesetting is the A3 paper. I know that in > LaTeX there are problems if someone want to use so big papers, and > therefore I have the question: what about MusiXTeX? Can I use the normal > A3 paper for writing my scores? And what about the font sizes? For > example if I have, let's say, 22 instruments, and I want 2 systems in > every page (that is 44 staffs and margins and the space between > systems), can I set the font size to something enough small? > > I have three other questions related to staffs. The first: can I put an > "ossia" somewhere in the score? That means: can I put a small staff that > begins in the middle of the line, and maybe ends before the end of the > same line? The second: can I change the number of staffs used by an > instrument inside a line? (For example, if I have 5 flutes in 5 > different staffs, but suddenly the 1-2-3 and 4-5 begin playing together, > so that I'd need only 2 staffs from that point -- I saw this for example > in the Eötvös piece mentioned above.) The third is: if someone writes an > orchestral score, there may be only few times when the full orchestra is > playing, and most of the time there may be instruments with very long > pauses. In this cases the scores normally only include in each system > the instruments that are actually playing in that system. Since MusiXTeX > does the the system-breaks automatically (which is in fact a very > powerful feature), does it care on this very important thing, or I'll > get scores with a lot of instruments full of pauses? And related to the > automatic system-breaking: I read that the system breaks are done at the > bars, which is normal in old musics, but what happens if a score doesn't > have any bar? > > My last and maybe very easy-to-answer question is, that which is the > biggest score size that can be managed with MusiXTeX? My biggest score > up to now (the above mentioned piece for 22 instruments) had 51 pages in > A4 format, but a normal orchestral score can easily have 70-80 pages in > A3 format (I'm not talking now about pieces like Stockhausen's Inori, > which has more than 200 pages in A3 paper). So if I want to write > orchestral music, do I have the chance for build scores with lots of > pages? (I know that there's no restriction, but I don't know if the > compiler breaks down or not building so big things.) > > Thank you very much for your answers, > Adam > > > ________________ > Siska Ádám > +36 (70) 207-63-85 > http://apocalypse.rulez.org/~sadam > _______________________________________________ > TeX-music mailing list > [email protected] > http://icking-music-archive.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-music _______________________________________________ TeX-music mailing list [email protected] http://icking-music-archive.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
