I tried typesetting music in LaTeX some time ago and gave up. The packages I found were hard to install, the examples didn’t work, etc. This weekend I decided to try again. I tried plowing through the MusiXTeX documentation and got no further than I did last time.

I posted a note on StackOverflow and got some good responses. Nikhil Chelliah suggested I look at LilyPond. I had looked at LilyPond before, and @jleedev explained how to integrate LaTeX and LilyPond.

Here’s some sheet music I included in my previous post, March in 7/4 time.

Here’s a full-sized PDF file version of the music above. And here’s the LilyPond source code used to create the music.

\relative c' {
\time 7/4
\key f \major
\clef treble
f g f \times 2/3{ c8 c c} f4 g a
g a8. bes16 a4 g f g c,
f g f \times 2/3{ c8 c c} f4 g a
g a8. bes16 a4 g f e f
}

The notation looks cryptic at first, but it makes sense after a few minutes. The command relative c' means that the following pitches will be relative to middle C. For example, the first note, F, is the F closest to middle C. Each note is the same length as the previous note by default, and the first note is a quarter note by default. The notation c8 means that the C is an eighth note, except it’s in the context of a triplet (times 2/3) and so it’s an eighth note triplet. The next F is denoted f4 to indicate that we’re back to quarter notes.

The notation a8. says that the A is a dotted eighth note. For the next note, bes16 means a B-flat sixteenth note. The suffix “es” stands for “flat” and “is” stands for “sharp.” (The documentation says it’s Dutch. I’ve never seen it before.) I don’t understand why I had to tell it that the B was flat. The code specified earlier that the key was F major, which implies B’s are flat. I suppose the code for individual notes is decoupled from the code to draw the key signature. That would make entering music painful in keys that have lots of sharps or flats. Maybe there’s a way to specify default sharps or flats.

The comma in c, gives the absolute pitch of the C. In relative mode, LilyPond assumes by default that each pitch name refers to the pitch closest to its predecessor. The C closest to the previous note, F, would have been the C up one fourth rather than down one fifth, so the comma was necessary to tell LilyPond to go down.

If I were to do a lot of music processing, I’d probably look at a commercial package such as Sibelius. But for now I’m just interested in producing small excerpts like that above, and it looks like LilyPond may be fine.

Update: I double checked the rules about flats etc. Yes, I do have to specify explicitly that the B in this example is B-flat. If I just say b rather than bes, LilyPond will add a natural sign in front of the B! It’s strange. It is aware of the key signature: when I tell it the B is flat, it says “OK, then I don’t have to mark that specially since it’s implicit in the key signature.” And if I don’t tell it the B is flat, it says “Oh, that’s an exception to the key signature. Better mark it with a natural sign.”