Lilypond

I mentioned back in June that one of my "Enterprising Ideas" was to do music publishing. Well, I got my first commission this week! Not that it pays anything, but I've been asked to set a piece of handwritten manuscript for next week's Abbot Consort concert.

I used Lilypond, a free music-engraving package. Rather unusually for these days of WYSIWYG editors for everything, it actally runs as a batch process on a text file. The input looks quite arcane, but is simpler than it looks. Here is a sample of my file...

...which gives a result that looks like this...

It's a pretty impressive tool, I think.

Hmm. Wait a minute. Maybe I shouldn't post this yet. It's meant to be a surprise for a member of the audience!

Update 19-Dec: Safe to post now. He did get a surprise!