The Donald MacDonald Project

An excited phone call from my friend Iain MacHarg at 10:30pm... "I know it's late, but guess what I have? Donald MacDonald 1828, just arrived" I was asleep, and didn't answer the phone. We've been playing phone tag for two days... This is an exciting opportunity.  The only first edition I've been able to find of this book that I could possibly access is in the library in Edinburgh... Now it's in Iain's very complete library of published bagpipe music.  The edition I've been using for our project is a sixth edition. I'm interested to see if there is a differing list of tunes, and the evolution of the embellishments over this period.  This could change drastically the content of our project

Today marks the completion of phase 1 of the Donald MacDonald project.  For those of you new to following this project which often sees many months without a public update, phase 1 is the re-engraving of the original versions of the tunes into lilypond. Today phase 1 is complete.  I am attending a conference. A saxophone conference to be exact. There is a snowstorm. I elected to stay in town instead of leaving the conference early to drive back north to Boston.  After returning to my hotel room this evening, I logged into my dropbox, looked at my Donald MacDonald folder and realized I was three tunes short of competing this phase of the project. Now there is much editing to do.  While I fixed some lilypond output of certain embellishments, I got a new computer and lost my edited version of bagpipe.ly . That will have to be re-created and the files re-compiled. Following that, I will need to edit for mistakes and/or general layout issues. Lilypond does a great job...

What is HIPP? No, not the Tower of Power song, but instead "Historically Informed Performance Practice."  This was a term introduced to me during my doctoral degree.  Prior to that time, everyone referred to this as HPP, "Historical Performance Practice." HIPP indicates that we are making informed assumptions about what the performance practice was based on records and writings and instrumental abilities.  During the baroque period of western music, (JS Bach era), the scores are sparse, but we know from writings and edits, that multiple embellishments were added to the music in performance by the performer themselves. When I look at the old scores for this project, I often see missing gracenotes between repeated notes. For example, look at the opening of the second part of the jig "The Borderers."  Here, the separating high g gracenote between the two long high A's is missing. HIPP suggests that we already know this is not possible, and that as...

I have always wanted to use Lilypond for the notational engraving on this project. Over half the book has been entered into Lilypond, but there has always been a slightly annoying issue. Grips, Taorluaths and D Throws just haven't looked right. The spacing of the stems within the gracenotes were never even. I'd finally had enough this week.  I emailed the Lilypond usergroup and asked if there was a solution to this that I was missing.  A few people chimed in that they also found it annoying but had not been able to fix it.  I was beginning to give up that it might be too deep into the code to do anything about, when an email from Thorsten gave me some hope. \stemspace #'(0 . 0.4)  grip  = { \pgrace { G32[ \stemspace #'(0 . 0.4) d G] } } Thorsten suggested I could do this in the bagpipe.ly definitions file that is included at the beginning of each tune I'm setting. I edited bagpipe.ly then recompiled my tune, and bam, problem solved. Now I'm ju...

Well this post isn't about me starting the project... it's about starting the blog of the project.  I've been working for a couple of years on an idea, publishing the out of print Donald MacDonald light music collection, complete with modern notation and embellishments and historical notes and research. As I've been working on this, I realize that I have no place to collect some of my thoughts and ideas about the project.  In phase 1 of the project, I need to get the entire collection into a computer notation program. I've elected to do this in Lilypond.  It's a flexible text based notation program that makes the entry very fast and it has more support than bagpipe music writer (BMW) as well as the typesetting have a more appealing aesthetic.  It also allows me to write comments (viewable in the coding, but not in the typesetting), that remind of things that need to be fixed, or things that are incomplete in the originals. This is where I am currently. As a ...