Re: Do we really offer the future?

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hi Gilles,

> This cannot be the overall guiding rule, if "progress" has any value at all.
> Is the sole expectation, of students attending music schools, to be
> hired by a publishing company?

Of course not — I neither said nor even implied that.

However, right now schools have the choice between spending valuable education 
time teaching young composers command-line programming for the purpose of using 
Lilypond to engrave scores which would never under any circumstances be 
accepted by any serious music publisher, or teaching them how to use the (e.g.) 
Sibelius GUI to quickly prepare a score that would be accepted (and in some 
cases demanded) by almost all publishers. It’s a no-brainer, and always will be.

And we’re not even talking about non-composers, i.e., the vast majority of 
music school students (singers and instrumentalists) who want to quickly crank 
out a transposition of a song or whatever. Expecting them or teaching them to 
use today’s Lilypond is beyond laughable: it’s actually cruel.

> Personally, I think that it is equally wrong to teach (how to become
> dependent of) proprietary products, the more so when a free (and more
> fit to the task!) alternative exists. [Cf. M$-Office versus LaTeX for
> typographic quality and consistency.]

I still think they should be teaching long division and cursive writing in 
elementary school, so you’re preaching to the choir to some degree. But it’s 
clearly not serving any student to teach them LaTeX at the expense of Microsoft 
Word, if any portion of their education is ostensibly so that they can graduate 
and fairly quickly become a productive member of today’s larger society.

The ratio of job postings I’ve seen that ask for “Microsoft Word skills” to 
those asking for “LaTeX skills” is on the order of 99:1. Far better — to extend 
your analogy — would be to shift the business world to using LaTeX *first* (or, 
at the very least, *simultaneously*), so that there is an actual demand for the 
[superior] skills we personally want to see taught.

> I might be wrong, but I think that the vast majority of music engraving
> software users don't make their choice based on what a publishing company 
> uses.

Well that’s self-evidently true for Lilypond users.  ;)

But you’re 100% wrong for the rest of the engraving world: as a working 
composer, arranger, and educator, I can say with 100% certainty that any 
GUI-based consideration beyond Finale or Sibelius (e.g., NoteAbilityPro, etc.) 
is met with intense skepticism in significant part because no publisher will 
accept the files once completed. (The GUIs are essentially in feature- and 
ease-parity, so that’s not a factor. And price doesn’t stop anyone: they either 
pony up or pirate.)

The very biggest hurdle is, and will probably always be, inertia: music schools 
install and instruct on Finale or Sibelius. And that’s in largest part because 
those are the [publishing] industry standards, so that just further proves my 
point.

> LilyPond would be a serious alternative for new publishing houses.

Not if it can’t *very easily* handle input files from Finale, Sibelius, and 
other “industry standard” engraving applications. That’s an almost foolproof 
recipe for financial failure.

Cheers,
Kieren.
________________________________

Kieren MacMillan, composer
‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info
‣ email: address@hidden