Of Music, Games, Science, and Software
News
2018-10-33T01 Firefox 59.0.2 Restore Cookie Prompt Patch.
I updated a patch to restore the per-site cookie prompt in the Mozilla Firefox Web browser for version 59.0.2.
2018-03-19T01 Fantasía by Alonso Mudarra.
I transcribed the Fantasía que contrahace la harpa en la manera de Luduvico by Alonso Mudarra.
2018-01-30T01 Why and How I Use LilyPond.
I posted an article explaining Why and How I Use LilyPond that may be useful to anyone considering using LilyPond to typeset music.
2018-01-25T01 La Catedral.
I renotated La Catedral by Agustín Barrios using LilyPond. This version is much improved over the previous Sibelius version.
Recent Additions and Updates
Firefox 59.0.2 restore Cookie Prompt Patch
Firefox used to allow you to be notified every time a Web site
attempted to set a cookie. You could decide to accept or reject
the cookie as well as specify the cookie lifetime and whether to
use your choice for all cookies from the Web site, thereby
updating your cookie preferences. This feature was removed in
Firefox version 44.0.
Fantasía by Alonso Mudarra
Fantasía que contrahace la harpa en la manera de Luduvico is a work composed by Alonso Mudarra for the vihuela
and published in 1546. It is often referred to
as Fantasía X or Fantasía
10 because it is the tenth fantasy in the table of
contents of Tres libros de música en cifras para vihuela.[1] As is the case with much
older music, the piece doesn't have a proper title. Instead, the
title describes the type of piece—a fantasy—along with
a description that may set it apart from other works of the same
type. I say may because multiple works
may use the same descriptive text. For example, in the table of
contents of Tres libros de música en cifras para vihuela there are two works listed
as Otra fantasía (Another
fantasy) and two more listed as Otra
fantasía fácil (Another easy
fantasy). Such works can be distinguished from each
other by their folio number or by assigning a number based on the
order of appearance compared to other works of the same type.
Why and How I Use LilyPond
In June of 2017, I received an email from someone using my classical guitar transcriptions inquiring about how I use LilyPond[2] to typeset (or engrave) music. He was dissatisfied with his existing WYSIWYG[3] commercial software and was looking for alternatives. He was impressed with the appearance of my transcription of Lágrima and wondered if I would share the source for it and my other transcriptions.
La Catedral
La Catedral is perhaps Agustín Barrios's
best known and most played composition. Even though La
Catedral is one of Barrios's early works (written in
1921), it didn't assume a final form until the last years of
Barrios's life, when the Costa Rica (1939) and El Salvador (1943)
manuscripts were written. Throughout his career, Barrios evolved
how he played La Catedral, adding and
removing parts, changing fingerings, and renotating entire
movements. As a result, you will find that nobody plays it
exactly the same way, depending on which transcription they are
working from and how their preferences shape the bits they
incorporate or omit to create their own unique renditions. Part
of the joy of listening to or performing La
Catedral is the variety of arrangements and
interpretations it makes possible, providing something new to
discover each time it is played.
Spread 5.0.0 kqueue and epoll Patch
This patch is a complete rewrite of a previous patch for adding
epoll and poll support
to Spread 4.x. It makes Spread 5.0.0 replace daemon select
calls with FreeBSD kqueue or
Linux epoll. POSIX poll
support for the client library is standard as of Spread release
5.0.0rc2 and no longer requires a patch. The availalability
of kqueue or epoll is
detected automatically. Therefore, you do not have to manually
define any macros. Using kqueue
or epoll can improve the performance of a
Spread daemon when it is serving thousands to millions of client
connections.
Guárdame las vacas (Otras tres diferencias hechas por otra parte.)
Guárdame
las vacas is a villancico more than half a
millennium old. Its basic structure consists of a
repeating bass part[4] overlayed with a
descant. A villancico literally being peasant music, it's quite
possible the bass part was commonly played by strumming chords
while the words were sung to the descant. Over time we've come to
associate the piece with the bass part only, which in A minor
would be: C–G–Am–E /
C–G–Am–E–Am (III–VII–i–V
/ III–VII–i–V–i). Narváez's first four
variations feature the bass part prominently, leading one to not
recognize fully the presence of the descant despite its integral
contribution to the variations.
[1] In English: Three books of music in tablature for the vihuela.
[3] What You See Is What You Get (i.e., software with a graphical as opposed to text-based user interface).
[4] The bass part appears in many compositions and is known as the romanesca in Italian. In Spain, it was so closely associated with the song that it was known as Guárdame las vacas. At the time, the harmonic pairing of the bass part and the descant was associated with those names.