Re: Good luck, Valentin

[Trevor Daniels]

Valentin Villenave wrote Monday, February 02, 2009 10:49 PM
> Greetings everybody,

Hi Valentin

Wow!  This is a major work!  It must be the largest LilyPond score
ever!  I compiled the full score last night to peruse, and it looks
awesome.   The pdf file is 6.65 Mb!

I haven't yet been able to look at it musically, but I thought I'd let you
know that it can be downloaded easily from your git site (although
you need to be git-aware to do this), and compiled under Vista.

I had to change only the \includes in main.ly from 

\include "./foo/bar.ly"   to  \include "foo/bar.ly"

but otherwise it worked first time out of the box.  There are a few
warnings, mainly about beam slopes and between-system-padding,
nothing serious.

It took quite a time to compile on my 2Gb laptop, partly because I
inadvertently started two compiles of the full score simultaneously 
(I now realise!), which caused quite a bit of paging, as you might
imagine.  It should compile much faster on a 4Gb machine, or one
at a time!

> the past couple of weeks has been exhausting and has almost been
> preventing me from following our mailing lists, but at least it's done
> now. As John said, there are still two performances on tommorrow and
> Thursday evening, but at least my work is done.

I'm not surprised!  I can't imagine even transcribing a work of this
magnitude, let alone composing it!

> I think it has been quite a success indeed. It's funny and
> straightforward, and both the audience and the perfomers seem to find
> it amusing.

I can't wait to examine it more closely now I have the score.

> We had a pretty decent media coverage, and not one single interview
> has been published without mentioning LilyPond and the special terms
> of the opera's license. As soon as I have more time (any day now),
> I'll tell you more about that (this very evening, I'm even advertising
> LilyPond on TV!).
>
> One other thing worth mentioning is that this project has allowed me
> to demonstrate LilyPond power and beauty. Some musicians have asked me
> to reprint their parts with a different layout, bigger staves, thicker
> barlines, more time to turn their pages, etc; all of which I've been
> able to do impressively quickly and perfectly; not to mention more
> complicated stuff such as clean transpositions, clefs fine-tuning etc.
> Several musicians have made nice compliments about the quality of
> their printed parts.

Absolutely!  It looks beautiful!

> As this opera is adapted from a comic book, I have included some
> graphics into the score, and it has been quite pleasant to see the
> musicians smile while playing, and to hear the conductor say "let's
> start back from... hem.. well, from the little drawing that looks like
> a castle".

I'm looking forward to discovering what the watering can means :)

> The license I have chosen wraps together the GPL for the source code
> (this way you may use any function, macro, PostScript or even chunks
> of music), and a CC by-nc-sa for the "narrative work" (characters,
> story, etc.), which has allowed us to "sell" our stuff to the opera
> house. Since this license is copyleft, it will also cover any
> derivative work such as the video recording that has been made, which
> I plan to offer on the Internet, with convenient subtitles.  This also
> means that the recorded music may be remixed, and redistributed in a
> non-commercial approach. (We'll wait for several months, and then see
> if we can remove the -nc- term from the license.)
>
> In the meantime, you can have a look at
> http://valentin.villenave.info/opera/download.html (in French)
> and at the source code:
> http://repo.or.cz/w/opera_libre.git
>
> As for the title, I think that would be "The Foreign Affair"...; by
> the way, I'm looking for a skilled translator to translate the
> subtitles. (and/or translate the libretto into English or other
> languages.) 

An opera promoter friend of mine is quite keen on comic opera.
I intend to show him this.  If you ever hear of a translation into 
English let me know.  I'm afraid I don't have any language skills,
though.

> Whether you want to read it, translate it, reproduce it,
> rewrite it accordingly to your tastes or needs, be my guest: this work
> is meant for everyone, and I'd be really happy if it could have a life
> of its own after my work is done.

Many, many thanks for all your work on this, and for LilyPond.

> Cheers,
> Valentin

Trevor