Hello and question about convertors

[Chad Thatcher]

Hello all.  I am working for the British Library on the RISM project (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales) which is cataloguing all musical manuscripts from earliest times to about 1800.  It is a public resource - no subscriptions or anything like that.  It is already available in primitive form at http://www.rism-ukie.org/ and currently has 43,000 published manuscripts with the final aim of having around 110,000 manuscripts catalogued.  And thats just the UK and Ireland initiative of the project.  Other countries are working away on their contributions.

The format used to store the music found on these manuscripts is called Plain and Easy (also spelt Plaine and Easie).  This format is maintained by the RISM Trust and International Association of Music Libraries (http://www.iaml.info/).  There is a PDF describing the format here: http://www.iaml.info/activities/cataloguing/plain_and_easy_code

I would like to convert these P&E Incipits into LilyPond format so that I can produce images of all the music for display online and also make available a link against every piece of music allowing the user to download it in LilyPond format. I have looked at the current convertors (eg. abctoly etc) and still have a long way to go to figure out how to write my own.  Once I write the script I will provide it as a GPL'd resource online (probably on the RISM site).

I would like to ask firstly if anyone has worked with P&E format and can provide me with sample scripts etc.

Secondly I would like to put out an example of a P&E incipit and get some feedback on the direction I should take, and indeed find out if it is similar to any other existing format. Here is an example of a p&e incipit straight from a marc record.

Title: À Bacchus je suis fidèle

Voice/Instrument: S

Clef: G-2

Time signature: 3/8

Coded Musical Inicipit: ''4C'8G/''4C8D/{ED}G/4Et8D/{EF}G/{DE}F/{E8.D}6C/4.C://:

Key: C

In some manuscript records only the first part of the music is stored and in other cases the entire piece.  Any help or hints to get me started would be greatly appreciated.  I will put up an accreditation and link to LilyPond on the site and I would also love to put up a few peoples names for their help.

Kind regards,

Chad.