/in-c-phrases-ly

A re-typesetting in Lilypond of individual phrases of In C.

Primary LanguageLilyPondCreative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 InternationalCC-BY-SA-4.0

Terry Riley's In C (Lilypond)

Loyola University Technology Ensemble performs Terry Riley's minimalist masterpiece In C frequently, and we have a lot of software that needs to visualize the phrases of it. We re-typeset the phrases in Lilypond so we can generate clean SVGs of individual phrases and reuse them across multiple applications. Each phrase has six transposed variants transposed above and below the original notation, so in total there are 571 Lilypond files.

File Structure

Each of the 53 phrases are contained in their own directory (1-53) inside the src/ directory with transposed variants three octaves above and below the original. For example, the following is a breakdown of the contents of the first phrase's directory:

  • 1_3.ly – First phrase transposed down three octaves
  • 1_2.ly – First phrase transposed down two octaves
  • 1_1.ly – First phrase transposed down an octave
  • 1.ly – First phrase transposed three octaves
  • 1+1.ly – First phrase transposed up an octave
  • 1+2.ly – First phrase transposed up two octaves
  • 1+3.ly – First phrase transposed up three octaves

Generating SVGs, PDFs and MIDIs

These Lilypond files require some features that are not available in the current stable version (2.18.2), so to generate assets you will need to use at least version 2.19.80. You also need to be running a UNIX-like operating system such as macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.

Running make at the root of the repo will generate all of the SVGs, PNGs and MIDIs and put them in a build/ directory.

make build