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manual on M-Tx - Werner Icking Music Archive

1. Start 0 1 0 3 Octave 4 4 33 Put specified items at the start of voice lines Specify initial octaves for each stave The Bars line command should only be used when you do not yet know what Pages and Systems should be The style line may contain several style elements instruments etc At present M Tx knows the following style elements SATB Voices S A T B Choral Clefs GF SATB4 Voices S A T B Choral Clefs GG G8 F SINGER Voices 3 Vocal Clefs G PIANO Voices RH LH Continuo Clefs G F ORGAN Voices RH LH Ped Continuo Clefs GFF SOLO Voices V Clefs G DUET Voices V1 Vc Clefs GF TRIO Voices V1 Va Vc Clefs G CF QUARTET Voices V1 V2 Va Vc Clefs GG CF QUINTET Voices Vi V2 Va Vci Vc2 Clefs G GC EF E SEXTET Voices Vi V2 Val Va2 Vc1 Vc2 Clefs GGCCFF SEPTET Voices Vi V2 Val Va2 Vci Vc2 Cb Clefs GGCCFFF Voices gives the labels of the voices later used to identify lyrics lines and out of sequence music lines You should not use labels like L U C 1 or L1 that conflict with M Tx use of labelled lines for chords lyrics etc Labels separated by blanks belong to voices on different staves labels separated by a comma to voices on the same stave Clefs define the clefs one for each stave You can use any PMX supported clef symbol in addition to G and F see Appendix B 3 The symbol 8 or G8 indicates music written in the treble clef but sounding an octave lower as is usual for the tenor voice in choral music
2. You can also conditionally ignore portions of the score depending on a compiler variable The compiler options 0 to 9 identify ten special cases of a score Together with the basic un numbered version of the score you can therefore have up to eleven versions A line starting with Case at the start of a paragraph gives a list of those cases that include the paragraph in question e g Case 137 identifies a paragraph that is only included when one of the options 1 3 or 7 was selected either as a command option or on and Options line All paragraphs headed by Case occurring before the first music paragraph are treated as extensions of the preamble The very first music paragraph may therefore not start with Case For example the score cervus mtx of Palestrina s four part setting of Psalm 42 see the source directory in the M Tx distribution is set up to give by default a score for the conductor with all voices in 16 point type When one of the 1 2 3 or 4 options is specified you get a score with one voice in 20 point type and the others in 13 point When the 0 option is given 20 point is used throughout and the score is spread over three pages A combination of Case and Only allows you to make parts from a score in a flexible way e g only the chorus parts or both flutes together etc The Case command can never be masked out by a previous Only 4 Acknowledgments I still have the tex and dvi files of my first attempt at setting musi
3. Thin thick double bar line as at the end of a piece E Thin thin double bar line to separate sections Left repeat Right repeat Left right repeat Bar lines make life easier but are normally optional Only the normal bar line actually implies a bar separation the double line and repeat signs may appear in mid bar The fancy bars must appear in the bottom voice and are optional elsewhere e If you do put them in M Tx will check that there are no shorter bars than the currently defined one If a too short bar occurs at the end of the final paragraph M Tx assumes you know what you are doing and automatically redefines the meter without printing a new time signature If it appears elsewhere it is an error e If your piece starts with a pickup it is defined by a bar line at the end of bar 0 i e the incomplete bar containing the pickup Even when there is a repeat sign after the pickup so that you don t actually see a bar line in the printed music you still need a bar line before the repeat sign otherwise M Tx cannot know where the pickup stops The bar line defining the pickup is compulsory in the first voice found and optional but recommended in the others When there is a pickup the meter is not redefined e If you do not explicitly end the piece with one of the other types of bar line a thin thick bar line is automatically provided you don t need to code it e PMX allows you to put two voices on a single sta
4. d d d d d d a a a d d d d d d d d d a a a e There is a basic melodic line with a separate line for the chordal notes labelled like a lyrics line but with C instead of L e For each chord there is one word on the chord line If the chord contains more than one chordal note the notes follow with no spaces in between The notation is the usual PMX notation with two changes flat and notehead left These changes are used only on chord lines and are unavoidable because e and f are needed for note names e The note chosen as melodic note on the main music line must not be a shifted note i e one with displaced notehead all shifted notes must be on the chord line e The stem direction of the chord is what that of the melodic note would have been in the absence of chordal notes Pitch on the melodic line i e the choice of the closest note with the given name is not affected by the chordal notes Each chord has its own local frame of reference starting 11 anew from its melodic note This differs from the PMX z notation where the pitch of each note is determined by the previous note whether chordal or not e Sometimes in the middle of a chordal passage there might be an isolated melodic note that does not have any chordal notes To indicate this the chord line must contain a spacer which is a one character word containing just a tilde e Sometimes you only need a few isolated chords A one characte
5. e You can simply assign an existing font e g to get somewhat smaller fonts let Bigfont bigfont let BIGfont Blgfont e You can define the font explicitly e g font BIGfont cmss9 scaled magstep4 E2 mtx tex The M Tx preprocessor as far as possible issues commands starting with mtx instead of direct TeX commands The main purpose for so doing is that the user can modify their effect by redefining them in the source file These files together with a few others that make life easier are collected in the file mtx tex Documentation of these commands can be found at the end of the file mtx tex A 19 0 54 Index G6 66 6 0 6 6 1656 3 10 35 6 1 A 2 1 A 2 0 A 5 1 A 5 9 A 5 b A 5 c A 5 f A 5 i A 5 m A 5 n A 5 t A 5 u A 5 v A 5 w A 5 4 1 4 lid 1 A 2 7 12 LL 6 12 A 2 A 3 12 A 7 hh 2 A 3 A 7 AL A 3 lerh 12 1106 x A 3 6 10 12 A 9 lt 12 gt 12 1 6 6 1 6 4 12 1 4 1 4 11 4 6 A 20 PR gt C2 v HA C2 gt N OON E LM GO P HHA v a A 2 A 7 accidentals A 4 adjustment A 11 Afrikaans 3 Archive A 4 arpeggio 12 b A 2 bar lines solid A 4 Bars line 8 9 beam forced 5 6 beams 5 BIGfont A 19 Bigfont A 19 blind meter change 5 14 slur 6 brace 8 bracket 8 C 11 A 3 CO A 3 C6 A 3 Case 15 Choral 8 chord 11 clef A 3 Clefs
6. mand Endpiece or as in this example setrightrepeat endpiece near the bottom of the MusiXT X file generated by the PMX preprocessing You may extend the actions of Endpiece or endpiece by saving the command with another name Nendpiecesav and redefine Endpiece to first execute endpiecesav and then request the inclusion of one or more files containg plain TEX code The text of the included file s will be typeset on unutilized space on the last page or else on a new page MusiXTEX commands like these may as noted in Appendix B 4 be put directly into the mtx source file in lines at the head of the first music paragraph In the current example two files have been included 1yrics tex contains the original Latin lyrics and an English translation A TpX table consisting of a template line followed by item lines for each lyrics line has been used to set up the text in two columns one for the lyrics and one in italics for the translation Notes on the song is included from notes tex and appended below the lyrics Contributed by Christian Mondrup following a hint by Werner Icking K a file notes tex vskip 10 mm noindent Lyrics by Morten B of rup 1446 1526 headmaster at the grammar school of Aarhus The song was published par with an anonymous melody in it Piae Cantiones rm by Theodoricus Petri Greifswald 1582 See Michael Doob A Gentle Introduction to TEX section 6
7. r 4 7 A 2 repeat 4 A 8 rest A 2 RESUME 15 return code A 6 R1 A 8 rp 6 7 s 4 A 2 SATB 3 5 Score A 17 score A 17 Sharps 3 shortcuts 11 Singer 5 Size 9 slur broken 6 continuation 6 direction 6 nested 6 slurs 5 smallmusicsize A 10 Space 3 9 A 9 spacer 12 spacing A 11 Start 9 stave 2 Style 3 7 style elements 8 9 suffix A 2 A 3 SUSPEND 15 syllable 4 system 3 Systems 8 9 T 7 t 11 tex A 5 TeX capacity exceeded A 16 TEX string Type 1 A 7 Type 4 A 7 tonic sol fa A 5 transpose A 4 A 22 triplet A 3 U 12 u 10 A 2 unbeam A 5 uptext 12 font 13 voice 12 V A 3 A 9 verse numbers 4 Vocal 8 voice 2 Voices 8 volta A 3 word 1 2 A 2 writebarno A 18 z 11 A 2
8. 2 The book may be found as gentle tex in the Documentation subdirectory of the TEX CTAN mirror archives A 14 file lyrics tex vskip 8 mm halign hskip 35 mm hfill amp hskip 25 mm it hfill cr In vernalis temporis amp In the time when cr ortu laetabundo amp spring rises joyfully cr dum recessum frigoris amp the end of frost cr nuntiat hirundo amp is heralded by the swallow cr terrae maris nemoris amp earth sea and grove cr decus adest deforis amp is full of beauty cr renovato mundo amp like a renewed world cr vigor redit corporis amp the body regains strength cr cedit dolor pectoris amp the sorrow of the heart ends cr tempore iucundo amp in this playful time Ncr 54 1 2 1 AE ere e e e e a o d 6 DX 2 In ver na lis tem po ris or tu lae ta bun do ter rae ma ris Dum re ces sum fri go ris nun ti at hi run do vi gor re dit F ES BP e 1 os 1 i 5 e e e Ee e e ne mo ris de cus ad est de fo ris re no va to mun do cor po ris ce dit do lor pec to ris tem po re iu cun do In vernalis temporis In the time when ortu laetabundo
9. Lam van God ek kom l 2 E PET e Net soos ek is net soos ek is O Lam van God ek kom This is coded as 5 b4 bb b2d ad aal a2d d4 e f g2 e4 d2d of L Net soos ek is net soos ek is O Lam van God ek kom d4s g f e2d e4 f e d2d d4 dr d d2 c4 d2d B 5 rpt6 b4ed c2d la4dc b2d b2 g4 f2d 1 LT Net soos ek is O Lam van God ek kom ad aa g2d g gg f2d b4 gt f e2 a4 d2d ofd L Net soos ek is net soos ek is O Lam van God ek kom Some interesting PMX features in this piece are of for ornament fermata and rp 6 rest pause for a full bar rest moved up six interlines For the meaning of the words see the next section The label LT Lyrics Tenor marks the line as belonging to a particular voice Such a line is referred to as an auxiliary lyrics line and may only appear on a stave that already has a normal lyrics line Labels for voices are defined in the Style or may simply be numbers the voices are numbered 1 2 from the top line downwards Auxiliary lyrics for the top voice on a stave soprano and tenor will be set above the stave and those for the bottom voice alto and bass below Their input lines may appear anywhere in the paragraph since the labels show where they go You can also use voice labels without a leading L to identify the voice lines This is necess
10. appears and remains in effect until further modified by another shift Each voice has its own associated shifts one for normal lyrics and a different one for auxiliary lyrics You can also say 0 2 put the lyrics above the stave at two internotes below the default position or v put the lyrics below the stave at the default position These options discard any shift that may have been in effect for that set of lyrics before Be warned that the default position itself is not fixed relative to the stave but depends on the general vertical layout So if you change a layout parameter after having placed the lyrics perfectly they may need a further adjustment Occasionally you need a syllable spanning two words You can code a hard blank to string the words together e g Egit to ad I si de but it also looks good to use an underscore which will be translated to a link e g Egit to ad I si de will become Egit to ad I si de If the link gets in the way of letters with descenders you can lower it e g prettyN and smart becomes pretty and smart 2 3 Beam and slur placement The decisions made by PMX in choosing the height and direction of beams and slurs may differ from what you would like The slur start character may have the suffixes up down or 1ower the last two mean the same to control the direction of the slur and a suffix or to raise or lower the start of the slur by st internotes The slur end character may also have
11. he OR oA CU e Ne How to get and use M Tx C 1 C 2 C 3 C 4 Installation e Kee oe kee RUE 4 xD RON n CURRUS OE CUR N RE AAA The prepus command line 5 uomo ee wes SS PO ESSE ER eee RT A Bugs restrictions and incompatibilities ms o o yo Re ce wee Re xc Moin cunis s e s Hy a A BR AA A ie HR a C 3 2 Unsupported features of MusixTpX and PMX For PMX and MusiXTpX perts OH Annotated examples D 1 D 2 D 3 D 4 D 5 D 6 Voltas a o Sor PEN NI ENIM ERAS N EDE BE do Misie Size t c a ren ME en Oe RUN pU SS CETUR E dU We gd cae De ER ses a RA BSc A psalm tune rcm Beams slurs and melismas a Dirty MACKS A Extra text after the piece 4 ica ads UE RR de BR Rod Sk 10 10 10 11 11 12 13 13 14 14 14 14 15 A 2 A 2 A 2 A 3 A 3 A 4 A 4 A 5 A 6 A 6 A 6 A 7 E M Tx and BEEK A 16 E 1 Collections of complete pieces e xe Aeg x ew RR BE RE ew ee AD A 16 E 2 Collections of morsels DA RR EE BR eae a a Re se UC OR RUN A 18 E 3 Documents with small music excerpts ss SS ES eee eee eee A 18 F Overriding predefined TEX commands A 19 ET CTI fonts s o sw qus eh e oen gat pedea AA d ADAE UO R Le A 19 E2 db SMEER R Let n tex MM Ge tuo OL ORO QUE KC EE IN A 19 ii 1 Music from Text Written music has a distinctive appearance very unlike written text But if we want to enlist the aid of the computer to print our scores we either need a sophisticated graphical interfa
12. octave implied by the clef is correct 2 Fine tuning the printed output The decisions made by PMX represent a good compromise in the majority of cases but some times the first printout is disappointing You can influence the details of the layout in various ways You will probably need to look at the first draft make fine tuning changes look at the second draft several times if you are a real perfectionist 2 1 General vertical and horizontal spacing It is best to use Bars 1ine in the preamble for the first draft You can then decide how many systems in total are required for proper horizontal spacing and over how many pages they need to be spread for proper vertical spacing On the later drafts you will therefore use Pages and Systems in the preamble There are PMX commands to put line and page breaks where you like see Appendix B You can use Space to control the vertical space between the staves There may be a number for every stave the last number is interpreted as extra space below the bottom stave You will probably need to specify it if you have lyrics or very low notes down there This command can be issued in any music paragraph not only in the preamble It will take effect at the start of the next system See Appendix D 1 for an example of how this option interacts with lyrics adjustments You can specify different sizes for the instruments e g Size 13 16 might be appropriate for the main score of a violin sonata
13. spring rises joyfully dum recessum frigoris the end of frost nuntiat hirundo is heralded by the swallow terrae maris nemoris earth sea and grove decus adest deforis is full of beauty renovato mundo like a renewed world vigor redit corporis the body regains strength cedit dolor pectoris the sorrow of the heart ends tempore iucundo in this playful time Lyrics by Morten B rup 1446 1526 headmaster at the grammar school of Aarhus The song was published with an anonymous melody in Piae Cantiones by Theodoricus Petri Greifswald 1582 E M Tx and BIEX This section assumes that you have some knowledge of BI The normal output from PMX is a stand alone plain TEX file which cannot without further ado succesfully be input into HIEX The file mtxlatex tex allows you to prepare music scores using BIEX rather than plain TEX which is particularly useful when you need the enhanced font handling features of BIFX and to produce books combining the outputs of several PMX runs into a single document such as a collection of songs or a mainly text document like this one with many small music excerpts Two points apply to all cases 1 Order of inclusion of packages is important mtxlatex must be the first package included before any font packages 2 It is easy to incur TeX capacity exceeded For example the index to this manual is a separate document because package multicol won t load on top of all the others If you wish to do large sc
14. the right You can also fine tune accidental position in a similar way For accidentals but not for dots you are allowed to write gs gt 1 instead of gs 0 1 A rest may also have suffixes duration and dot as for notes pause duration is the whole bar blank rest is counted but not printed It can be moved up and down by and followed by a number e g r0 4 is a whole note rest moved down four internotes The other rest suffixes mentioned in Section 3 7 are not yet version 1 3 8 part of PMX except m which is allowed in a score for a single one stave instrument Also the blind and adjustment suffixes on the pause rp are legal in M Tx but not yet in PMX The duration of a note may be influenced in various ways by a previous note if unspecified it is the same as the previous note or the note may be part of a chord a multiplet or a grace note group B 2 Words excluded from the count Except for the first note of a chord or multiplet the following words for notes are excluded from the count and should not have a duration suffix Chords Each note in a chord except the first has the prefix z It is excluded from the count and suffixes a 1 u may only appear on the first non z note The melodic note of Section 3 1 becomes the first note of the chord when the M Tx code is translated to PMX 9The suffix is not part of PMX Instead PMX offers the ability to specify octaves by numbers This feature is not supported
15. to computer programmers as run time binding We have already met examples of how to exploit this feature in Sections D 5 and D 6 where respectively meterC and Endpiece were redefined The macros of the previous section also work in that way by locally i e inside the various environments redefining commands that appear in the TEX file generated by PMX The technique is an extremely powerful and flexible one and in the hands of an expert can achieve practically any desired result Here we can only scratch the surface One point to note is that good programming practice requires that you save the current meaning of the command and restore it later e g let commandsave command def command let command commandsave In BIR if you redefine a command inside an environment the saving and restoring is automatic E1 Changing fonts The font used for lyrics is the default text font of the moment which usually is ten point roman It can be changed globally e g 44 Ntwelverm in the preamble will change the font to twelve point When using BIX you can use font changing commands inside the environment to change the lyrics font only for that particular piece The fonts used for titles and other items in headers are respectively called BIGfont and Bigfont In mtxlatex sty they are redefined as follows renewcommand BIGfont Huge bfseries renewcommand Bigfont Large If you are not using BIFX they can be redefined in two ways
16. u Uptext synchronizes with notes only not rests v Verbose progress report Default behaviour is to print out errors warnings and very little more w Suppress pedantic warnings i e cases where it is unlikely that you have made a mistake 0 1 9 Select specified case of multiple score See Section 3 8 A 5 The prepmx program exits with return code 0 if no error was found and return code n if an error was found while processing line n of the input Return code 10000 means that the input file was empty or could not be opened or that an invalid option was encountered In the latter case a list of valid options is displayed Therefore a quick way of seeing the command line options is to invoke prepmx with an invalid option e g prepmx In some cases the actual error may be on another line e g when it is found that music lines have a different duration the first line processed may be in error but the discrepancy is only found later C 3 Bugs restrictions and incompatibilities The status of bugs changes too quickly for this document Please consult the BUGS file or look at the comments at the top of prepmx c In M Tx 0 54 a paragraph may not be more than 100 lines long an input line including those in lyrics paragraphs not more than 255 characters a lyrics line in a music paragraph not more than 128 characters and you may define a maximum of 12 extra style elements of your own whether in the preamble or in the mt
17. with the notes of the violin smaller than those of the piano Valid sizes are 13 16 20 24 and 29 Size is a delicate issue see Appendix D 2 You should be aware of what the PMX manual calls a benign bug Pages more than approx imately half full get filled out by distributing the vertical space among the staves This means that the appearance of the score may drastically change when you add one more stave For this reason it is best to leave space adjustments till last when you already know what values to give for Systems and Pages Occasionally PMX underestimates the total height of a page and you end up with one system less than you wanted which then appears by itself on a page of its own This is particularly likely if you asked for extra space between the staves or are using different sized staves A dirty trick that fixes this problem is to specify a little more height directly to MusiXTEX than you told PMX see Appendix B 0 54 2 2 Lyrics placement Sometimes the default position for placing lyrics causes ugly clashes with note stems beams slurs etc You can move lyrics up or down by inserting a word starting with 6 in the music line to which that lyrics line is attached For example 0 2 at minus two indicates that the lyrics should be moved down two internotes One internote is the vertical distance between e g a B and a C i e half of one interline The change takes effect at the start of the bar in which it
18. 8 command line A 5 switch A 5 comment A 7 Continuo 8 crescendo 13 d 1 10 13 A 2 A 3 decrescendo 13 dot fine tuning A 2 duration 1 A 2 e 11 A 2 editor A 5 elemskip 13 Endpiece A 14 endpiece A 14 ERROR A 5 example A 19 excerpts A 18 exotic meters A 13 f 6 7 11 A 2 A 3 final bar A 8 Flats 3 font change A 17 G A 3 Group 8 guitar chords 12 hard blank 10 heading 2 Indent 11 instrument 3 interline 4 internote 10 jump 1 key A 3 D 1 10 11 A 2 L 4 7 label 4 12 labels 7 VLargemusicsize A 10 Vlargemusicsize A 10 line 2 chord 11 melodic 11 line break A 3 LT 7 lyrics 3 auxiliary 7 10 link 10 A 21 normal 7 m 14 m3 4 0 0 5 mailing list A 1 Meter 3 meter change 5 Meter 5 mtx A 5 mtx tex A 19 mtxlatex A 17 mtxlatex sty A 19 mtxlatex tex A 16 mtxstyle txt A 5 A 6 mus A 18 musixlyr 15 A 4 A 8 m A 3 A 4 n 4 A 2 A 3 Name 10 NEW 0 54 6 8 9 A 7 A 16 A 19 normalmusicsize A 10 note chordal 11 grace A 3 melodic 11 notes 1 dotted 1 13 o 7 A 3 Octave 9 octave 1 A 2 A 7 octave defining initial 9 of 7 Only 15 Options A 5 ornament A 3 ornaments 14 p 7 A 2 AS page break A 3 Pages 8 9 paragraph 2 pedal A 7 phrase marks 6 pickup 4 A 8 pitch A 2 of chordal note 12 PMX A 2 A 4 A 7 PMX A 3 ppff 13 preamble 2 7 prepmx A 5
19. M Tx Music from Text Version 0 54 User s Guide Dirk Laurie dlaurieOna net ornl gov 10 January 2002 mmm 6 a r L y sf sf sf Contents 1 Music from Text 1 1 1 2 1 3 1 4 1 5 LYNCS Eod ee be dd Uds m Ree Rio RE Re AG de moe RR 9E SIE i Bars and meter changes s sd sk se 005 ERR RES TER YA Beams and slurs e More complicated lyrics SS o e Preamble commands SS SS Rg SS SE SE R RN Fine tuning the printed output 2 1 2 2 2 3 2 4 General vertical and horizontal spacing o Lyrics placement Beam and slur placement 2 2 Instrument NAMES e imc e a da deer R ae eo ae Shortcuts 3 1 3 2 3 3 3 4 3 5 3 6 3 7 3 8 Ghords o 64 4 4 ads e arre is ar e ad de Expression marks and other annotations llle Lyrics paragraphs Josue RESIDAN Long short note combinations e e Batiess SIG y neo dr a oem ME da le at o RES d ola Sticky ornaments and suffixes acies WEN RC Rc A a a ITS Be E TESIS iea pu x 9 ow XP WR e ER HOED RE EER ME RR s Skipping portions of a score yw Ro qo CCS Vor HR LU RI RC E x Acknowledgments Where to find help A short PMX tutorial B 1 B 2 B 3 B 4 Words that contribute to the count SE SS ee eee Words excluded from the count Words for other things than notes es 6444 oo UE UR RP ORE Useful things to put on anes o osx
20. Tx I have left out or simplified features that are not necessary or too advanced In most cases you can still use them as M Tx simply passes through anything that it does not recognize PMX resembles English in that it is made up of words which are strings of non blank charac ters separated by blanks Each word though has the character of an acronym in that its letters each stand for something longer and in fact Don Simons designed the notation so that you can actually say out loud what the acronym stands for In the following the symbol stands for some number B 1 Words that contribute to the count Each bar of music has a certain duration which is is the total of the notes and rests in it The word for a note that contributes to the count starts with a to g which indicates pitch and the word for a rest starts with r A note may have a number of su fixes which may come in any order The duration is indicated by a digit from short to long these are 6 1 64 th note 3 1 8 4 2 0 whole note 9 double note also known as breve Moving a note an octave up or down is indicated by and repeated if necessary The other suffixes are the following marked letters dotted flat sharp natural stem upper stem lower offset to the right offset to the left apart not attached to a beam You can fine tune dot position e g gd 2 puts the dot two internotes lower than it would normally go and gd 0 1 puts it one notehead to
21. Vocal means that the voices will be treated as vocal for the purpose of beams and lyrics and Continuo means that the staves belong to a single instrument and will be grouped together by a brace You may not have too many voices or staves see Appendix C 3 Choral means that the voices form a choir This implies that each voice is vocal and their staves will be grouped together by a bracket You can get the bracket for instrumental voices too by using Group instead of Choral 0 54 You may define your own style elements e g Honky Tonk Voices R L Clefs G F Continuo The whole preamble is read and new style elements saved before any of the commands is interpreted So it does not matter in which order the commands come The preamble may be spread over more than one paragraph But if you issue a command more than once only the last instance counts The Start command is mildly convenient when you are experimenting with fine tuning since it allows small additions affecting the beginning of each voice to be collected in one place It comes into its own when combined with the multi score option see Section 3 8 Items for each voice are separated by semicolons and may contain blanks These are prepended to the corresponding line of the first paragraph so the combined length of the starting item and the line in question should not be too long see Section C 3 You don t normally need to specify 0ctave since most of the time the
22. already en countered and some of which are given in Appendix B There are situations where you might wish to have several consecutive notes or rests with the same attribute The method is sim ilar put a colon after the letter involved on the first note of such a sequence leave out the letter on all the notes except the last on which you again put the letter For example in 12 8 meter you might have a passage moving at four beats to the bar normally coded c4d cd ed ed gd gd c2d which becomes c4d c e e g g c2d when you use this shortcut The stickyness of note and rest suffixes lasts until cancelled Each voice is treated on its own and notes and rests are considered independently so if you make the d sticky on a note it will not affect rests My favourite application of this feature occurs in homophonic music with two voices per stave I prefer to have only one rest per stave rather two rests one on top of the other and so I make all the rests in one of the voices blank by marking the first rest of that voice 3 7 Multi bar rests It may happen that all the instruments in your score simultaneously have a rest of two or more bars In that case a succession of empty bars may be difficult to count and the conventional notation is to put all the rests in a single bar with the total number of bars printed above them The word for a multi bar rest is e g rm8 for a rest of eight bars You code this for one voice only and there may be no othe
23. an adjustment suffix Remember to fine tune both end points when you wish to move the whole slur up or down It is also possible to fine tune the horizontal position The most common case occurs when two notes on the same pitch are linked by a tie In that case t and t give a neater result than C and See the PMX user s manual for details on other horizontal adjustments In the case of a slur continuation you should code the height adjustment between the two parentheses e g 3 You must not have two adjustments but you may code t t for a continuation tie Fine tuning beams is all done on the beam start character It may have the suffixes upper or lower for direction and up to three or suffixes The first raises or lowers the beam by so many internotes the second makes the beam more or less steep and the third also raises or lowers the beam but this time in units of beam thickness 2 4 Instrument names Some scores have indications like Violin to the left of the first system The easiest way to do this is to use the n compiler option which uses the line labels as names but you may not like the result To do it yourself use the Name command in the preamble e g Name Violin Piano The names can be any valid TEX expressions that have no spaces such as it French Horn Remember it s one name per instrument not one name per stave If you have too few names the remaining instruments will not be named You can also use a si
24. aph to make the 6th system start there and 4 4L6P2 to put that paragraph at the top of page 2 You can t ask for a page break without a line break Use this feature only when necessary Put L10M 10i0 1 to make a new movement start at the 6th system with 10 internotes of extra space between movements and an indentation of 0 1 10 of the width h260m Height is 260 millimetres w8i Width is 8 inches vsize 270mm Height given to MusiXTEX is 270 millimetres Ar Use relative accidentals This requires a different way of coding flats and sharps think of s as meaning sharpened instead of sharp E g if the key signature has one or more flats then bs means a B natural bn a B flat and bf a B double flat If you need to transpose music often it is a good idea to acquire the habit of using relative accidentals always If you don t only pieces in C major or A minor can be transposed without trouble As Always use small accidentals Normally PMX uses big accidentals and only switches to smaller ones if there is a reason to do so You can also force all big accidentals by Ab Ar K 1 3 Use relative accidentals and transpose the piece up one internote to a key with three flats You can only transpose correctly when using relative accidentals stdbarrules This will cause bar lines to be drawn solidly from the top to the bottom of each system maybe cutting through lyrics in the process Midi commands PMX can make MIDI files For e
25. ary if some voice is omitted from the paragraph M Tx will fill its stave with rests or if you prefer to have the voices in a different order e g bottom up than top down You need only label a voice line if it does not belong to the voice immediately following the previous one 1 5 Preamble commands Here is a complete list of built in preamble commands with examples and explanations Case in preamble commands is immaterial all command and style names are translated to uppercase internally Part Recorder Title Clarinet Quintet Composer Mozart Poet Rellstab Meter C Flats 3 Sharps 2 Space 60 3 PMX hiOi Options x Pages 2 Systems 11 Bars line 4 Size 16 Style Singer Piano Name Dietrich Gerald Indent 0 10 Part name set flush left above title Title of piece Name of composer set flush right below title Name of poet set flush left below title Alla breve meter another notation for 2 2 Key signature has three flats Key signature has two sharps Extra interlines of space below staves PMX command in preamble Superseded by 4 feature Forces the x option to be in effect despite the command line Set the piece over two pages Use a total of eleven systems Try to use on the average four bars to a line Size of music in points default is 20 The piece is for a singer with piano accompaniment Names of instruments performers etc Indent first system by 1096 of the music width
26. by M Tx Multiplets A normal note may have an extra suffix after all the others of the form x or x n where stands for a number This means that the note is the first of a multiplet or x tuplet with st equal notes in the time of one Only the duration coded on this first note is included in the count The appearance of the first note will not be the normal one for its specified duration it will look like all the others E g g4x3 a b defines a triplet of total duration a quarter note looking like three eighth notes The n means that the number st is not to be printed Grace notes A normal note may have a prefix group starting with G or G This indicates that the note is the first of a grace note group with notes to be set in a tiny font All the notes in the group even the first are excluded from the count B 3 Words for other things than notes Other things than notes go into a music score ornaments clefs expression markings changes in key and time signature etc PMX contains support for many of these Here I mention only a small selection see the PMX manual for items you need but which are not described here A word for each such feature has its characteristic first letter followed by a selection of suffixes that qualify it Ornament An ornament is set off stave in line with its note and its word starting with o comes directly after that of its note The more commonly needed suffixes are u dot for pizzicato p prime fo
27. c Bach no less with the MUTEX package of Andrea Steinbach and Angelika Schofer The first phrase goes 4 F 7 B c I 2 A 1 4 B E E 1 2 group E d 0 1 lslur12 go In M Tx that would be f bd c8 a2d b4 e e e2 d4 A tantalizing glimpse of a preprocessor appeared in the MUTEX documentation but the software for it was never released None of this would have been possible without Daniel Taupin who was the first to emphasize that printed music has a fundamentally two dimensional layout and whose MusiXTEX package is the engine that actually performs the typesetting I made a previous attempt to implement something like M Tx as a direct preprocessor to MusicTEX Daniel s first package still being maintained and preferred by some to its successor My lack of expertise caused that project to die The appearance in January 1997 of PMX 1 1 inspired me to resurrect the idea thanks to Don Simons Don has also made some comments which helped me to improve the M Tx input language Some nifty M Tx features not yet in PMX itself such as multi bar rests in scores with more than one stave have been implemented using MusiXTeX code written by Don Since version 0 21 M Tx uses Rainer Dunker s musixlyr package This gives much neater horizontal spacing of lyrics than the manual system used in previous versions and virtually eliminates the need for horizontal tuning 15 Chris Walshaw s ABC2MTEX provided the repeat notat
28. ce or we must describe music in terms of what we are able to type Text input is not going to look much like printed music but we would like it to resemble printed music closely enough that we can see the correspondence M Ix is a language for typed music aimed at people who are not experts Later in this docu ment a full description of M Tx is given but to start with here is a sample of what M Tx input looks like c2 el g b4d cid c2 c8 gstegc gtreglildgfg c gteg Before showing you how it comes out let s observe and discuss it There are two lines of input which means that there are two voices of music one for each line Line boundaries are important in M Tx The lines read from top to bottom as printed music reads from top to bottom Each voice contains a number of words separated by blanks In this example each word stands for either a note or a bar line Bars are also important in M Tx although the example is simple enough that I could have omitted them For greater readability I have typed extra blanks so that notes and bars that are aligned in the printed version also line up here but that is not necessary What is necessary though is that each line ends at the end of a complete bar The notes are written in the PMX language designed by Don Simons Each note starts with one of the letters a to g which mean exactly what you think Lower case is easier than capitals because it is quicker to type Some notes hav
29. e and nearly complete PMX and M Tx are both still in a stage of growth Their authors are reasonable people who subscribe to the discussion list tex music sunsite dk and are open to suggestions made there If you have any ideas please email them to the list so other users can see them and comment on them The implementation of new features depends on three factors what I need in my own scores what users of M Tx have asked me to do and how easy and quick it is to do them But bear in mind that the underlying philosophy of M Tx is to be simple and intuitive arcane features are best left to PMX if not MusiXTEX I don t mind how sophisticated the PMX code generated needs to be but the M Tx input language must not acquire a cluttered and obscure appearance Support or otherwise of MusixTEX and PMX features comes at three levels A 6 1 The most frequently used features are transparently incorporated into the basic M Tx language 2 The default action of M Tx is to pass through unchanged anything it does not recognize Most PMX and MusiXT X features still work in this case For example you can use PED in front of a note to obtain a pedal annotation below the stave and DEP to get the big asterisk for pedal release This is an example of a Type 1 TEX string as described in the PMX manual 3 When a new PMX feature affects aspects like count or pitch of which M Tx should be aware it is likely to be incompatible with the preceding releas
30. e of M Tx although I do try to catch up later Some pertinent aspects 1 M Tx 0 54 does not recognize the macro features of PMX You should therefore not use macros for notes or anything else that affects the count the duration the current octave and other properties that are inherited by a note from the next But there is no harm in using macros for things like extra space 2 M Tx 0 54 is not aware of movement breaks and the possibility to change the number of voices C 4 For PMX and MusiXTEX perts only You can send commands directly to PMX All lines starting with in music paragraphs are collected stripped of the leading and passed otherwise uninterpreted to PMX before anything else from that paragraph is translated If such a line is found in a preamble paragraph it is treated as a Type 4 TRX string TEX string which means that it will eventually appear at the top of the TEX file after musixtex tex and pmx tex have been read in Such lines should not end with V An example appears in Appendix D 5 As in TEX a line starting with only one is treated as a comment such lines do not appear in the PMX file If you ever need to pass through something involving stave or instrument numbers remem ber that PMX and MusiXTEX number these from bottom to top not from top to bottom and that the first voice in PMX is the bottom stave to M Tx Apart from the conversion of lyrics and chord lines into PMX commands which is the mai
31. e preamble and PMX lines this is coded as The coding is for this morsel only not an extract out of the coding for the whole piece The octave of the first note here is the default not deduced from a previous note b4 bc d2 a4 g2a4 f2 f4 e2 a4 d4 c b a2d g4 ge d2 d4 d2 c4 d2 d4 b2 e4 C f4e d c2d L ge trek tot U deur boor de sy O Lam van God ek kom L Op U be lof te steun ek bly O Lam van God ek kom L Dan wy ek my vir e wig Heer O Lam van God ek kom b4 b bf a2 a4 b2 a4 a2 a4 g2s al a2 g4s a2d e4 eg f2f4 e2 a4 d2 d4 d2 c4 b4e e add Apart from f for flat you should notice the left parenthesis to start a slur and the right parenthesis to close it So M Tx knows that e g the c in the top voice falls under the slur and does not use up a syllable of lyrics The default direction of a slur is up for the upper and down for the lower voice in a stave but you can override that see Section 2 3 Occasionally a slur ends at a note and the next one starts immediately For such a slur continuation you code as a single word after the note You are allowed to have a slur under another slur If the two slurs start at the same note you may code e g g4 gl f e d c4 but otherwise it is better to code the outer slur using braces instead of parentheses e g c8 d e g g f d b c2 Actually M Tx only makes a distinction between 1 and not betwe
32. e suffixes after them A digit indicates the duration 1 2 1 4 1 8 1 16 1 32 1 64 When a note has no digit it means that the duration is the same as that of the previous note in the same voice Some note names have a or after them which means that it is not the nearest note of that name but that there is a jump of at least a fifth up or down from the previous note One note is dotted which is indicated with a d It cannot be confused with a note name because it is not the first letter of its word A double dotted note would have dd The first note in each voice of the piece doesn t have a previous note Since you haven t specified anything else it is assumed that the top line is in the treble clef and its notes come in the octave running from middle C upwards and the bottom line is in the bass clef and its notes come in the octave just below the one for the treble clef The first note of the top voice is the C above middle C so we need a for it If ever again you prefer the initial octave of a voice to wherever the previous note puts you use a after the note name This can be combined with Of Here is the printed version of the above excerpt je e E One such is noteedit by J rg Anders obtainable from the Archive see Section C 1 Yes it is more logical to think 1 should mean a whole note but we d
33. each line to compensate for the different number of lyrics lines Usually if you do that you will need some vertical adjustment 0 7 and 0 2 in this case to make the output look right A 11 D 4 Beams slurs and melismas Style Singer Meter C 6 C Start 2 e e 9 2 Wu e A men hh w2i c8 di el d8 el f1 e2 L A men c8 d1 e1 d8 el fi e2 oe o L A men A men 637 c8 d el d8 el f1 e2 L A men A men 4 Let BM beginmel let EM endmel c LL BM c8 di e1 d8 ei NEMN f1 e2 e ova L A men A men c8 d1 e1 nolyr d8 e1 f1 e2 C e ova L A men P A men 3 c8 MyrN di ei d8 e1 f1 e2 L Hal le lu ja C L A men 6 C S S alle lu ja A men Some points to note Example 1 uses a slur with default PMX beaming Example 2 uses forced beaming to beam all notes Example 3 does both Examples 4 and 5 violate the M Tx convention that notes sung to a single syllable must be slurred or beamed together so we override this in either of two ways using musixlyr commands Example 4 uses Nbeginmel and Nendmel to force melismas in a situation where has suppressed them this method is good for long melismas over several beamed components Example 5 suppresses lyr
34. en and so c8 de gg f db c2 would not give interlocking slurs You may not have three levels of nested slurs In obscure situations you may want absolute control over slur stops and starts To do this put an identifier which must be a non zero digit or a capital letter immediately after the slur parenthesis or brace before any adjustments Of course any labelled slur of either kind that you open must be closed again by its exact partner If you really must have interlocking slurs 1 c8 d e 2 g g 1 f d b 2 c2isthe way to get them It may happen that you do not wish M Tx to put more than one note to a syllable even though the notes are under a beam or slur For example you may wish to use phrase marks that only look like slurs or you may be writing music that has so many consecutive short notes that the beat becomes difficult to follow without beams The way to do this is to double the first symbol of the word starting the forced beam or slur E g 10 or may be used to start a phrasing slur and may be used to start a forced beam that will still keep one note to a syllable The terminator for the beam or slur should not be doubled A variation of this feature occurs mainly when you have multi verse lyrics and there should be a slur in one verse but not in another Start the slur with or to get the same effect as or except that the slur symbol itself is no longer solid but broken like a dotted line Synchronize lyrics b
35. h on the Space line This is the one preamble command that may also appear later in a music paragraph Among the notes you notice suffixes s and n for sharp and natural and r for displace notehead to the right But the main novelty is the lines of lyrics The rule is each lyrics line is identified by the label L followed by lyrics of the verse in question Syllables are indicated by hyphens and you don t use bar lines on lyrics lines If more than one note belongs to a syllable you need not worry as long as the notes in question have been slurred or beamed together each lyrics line is synchronized to the immediately preceding voice There may be a set of lyrics lines for each stave in the score if a stave has two voices only one of them can have lyrics specified by L see Section 1 4 for an option that allows both voices to have lyrics Note the verse numbers The rule is if you code a number followed by a point and a blank at the start of a lyrics line this number will not be treated as a syllable but will be printed to the left of the first lyrics syllable the position of that syllable will be the same as if the number was not there This may not be just what you want see the musixlyr reference manual Section A for commands that can modify this behaviour 1 2 Bars and meter changes The notation for bars is taken from Chris Walshaw s ABC2MTEX music language with one small modification Normal bar line 1
36. he numbers that show where the voices enter This is done by redefining the writebarno command E 3 Documents with small music excerpts This manual relies heavily on the mus environment For example the musical emblem on the front page was set using the commands begin center framebox 5in parbox 3 6in begin mus input title tex bigskip end mus Hr end center Some points to note e The excerpts vary in length and some experimentation is required to get the dimensions and positioning just right e Putting the mus environment inside a center environment only works when the music line is not longer than the text Otherwise it is useful to use hskip as in the case of the first example in the manual hskip 18mm begin mus input mozartO tex end mus A 18 For this technique to work properly it is essential that the above four lines form a para graph of their own i e they are preceded and followed by blank lines Appendix D 4 was produced using the command example This is a rather complicated macro with eight parameters which is documented at the end of the file mtxlatex sty F Overriding predefined TEX commands This section assumes that you are an experienced TEX user The logical structure of TEX is such that most of the time a command used in a definition need not exist at the time that the definition is made as long as it is defined by the time that the definition is used This behaviour is known
37. ics where the beaming would have put them Example 6 uses Myr to force lyrics where the beaming would have suppressed them and shows the use of empty syllables to synchronize lyrics and of broken slurs to indicate different slurring in the two verses Suggested by Stefan Haller D 5 Dirty Tricks Style Piano Meter m3406 def upiii i raise3 internote hbox 1 def chacarera meterfrac34 upiii Big meterfrac68 upiii Big 44 NletNoldmeterC 1meterC let meterC chacarera w100m a 2d o gt a8 rrarr a2d o C dfsa cea cea dfsa d 2d o gt 15 a4 a 1 h d8 2u d d 2d 1 zd 2 61D qa d E a gt AS Ar VOOR oe B ct These are bars 7 9 of the Credo from Misa Criolla by Ariel Ram rez It is in the chacarera trunca meter which mixes 3 and S time There is no PMX construction for such exotic meters so we need to be ingenious We specify the meter as m3406 which tells PMX to use 3 meter but to print the C sym bol for common time Of course we do not actually want the C symbol we want something that looks like 3 8 Now all that PMX knows about the C symbol is that it is called meterC in MusiXT X So we define chacarera and assign it to meterC in preamble commands These appear in the TEX file after the command to read in musixtex tex but before the com mands that actually print something If later we need the origi
38. in the next paragraph but if the voice concerned no longer has lyrics attached to it you should indicate that by a blank lyrics line i e L by itself A particular lyrics paragraph name should not be used in more than one place If two voices have exactly the same lyrics you need only one lyrics paragraph but more than one name E g soprano bass makes two identical sets of lyrics one to be used by L soprano and the other by L bass One useful property of lyrics paragraphs is to allow you to switch lyrics in the middle of a line instead of between music paragraphs This is only allowed if the voice in question already possesses lyrics it cannot be used to replace the L line E g a b chorus c d means that starting at the note c lyrics will be taken from the lyrics paragraph labelled chorus and a b 1 c d means that lyrics are switched off at that point 3 4 Long short note combinations Passages containing dotted notes require duration changes for every note c8d gl c8d g1 c8d gl c8d gl c4 There is a shorthand notation for this namely c8 g c d c g c d c The first note in a dotted group may have an explicit duration which then becomes the default duration but the second must not There is a similar shortcut c d for double dotted notes When the dotted note appears not in a group but on its own as in triple and compound time 3 4 12 8 etc you must use a d to indicate the dot not a period 7It is quite technical t
39. ion The layout of M Tx bears some resemblance to a language developed by Miguel Filgueras not yet publicly available in software although I did not consciously borrow his ideas I had some enlightening e mail correspondence with the developers of MPP Jan Nieuwen huizen and Han Wen Nienhuys This package no longer being maintained unfortunately the authors are working on something altogether grander called LilyPond was the first music pack age which made me believe that one could write good looking scores in a reasonable amount of time Eric Petersen Reenen Laurie Kestell Laurie and Joel Hunsberger found several bugs in ear lier versions of M Tx Christian Mondrup did this for M Tx 0 50 and later The subscribers to the discussion list tex music sunsite dk too many to name found many more and contibuted to the development by requesting new features The success of public domain music publishing owes an incalculable debt to the late Werner Icking He maintained an online archive for music software and sheet music set standards for music typesetting tested software packages gave genuinely expert advice to would be experts and encouraged newbies with patience and understanding When he died unexpectedly at a comparatively young age each of the small but globewide community of users of MusiXT X lost a personal friend and mentor His music archive as it was at the time of his death can still be accessed at ftp ftp gmd de music Or ht
40. k is nooi U vir my ver ge we rei nig en be vry 3 Net soos ek is U lief de teer werp al le hin der pa le neer ad d d al J J dud 422 d sd tf ey fy e e e fe e e The lyrics are in Afrikaans which maybe looks incomprehensible but knowing as much as you do already it should be quite easy to understand the following input Title Net soos ek is Composer Charlotte Elliott Style SATB Sharps 2 Meter 3 4 Space 9 w190m f f f e2s e4 d d d2r d4r f2 b4 a2d g4 g g f2 f4 g2 c4n b2d d2 d4 d2d e4 ee d2s d4 e2 f4 f2d d L 1 Net soos ek is geen hulp na by al leen U bloed ge stort vir my L 2 Net soos ek is nooi U vir my ver ge we rei nig en be vry L 3 Net soos ek is U lief de teer werp al le hin der pa le neer a a2 g4 a2d b4 b b c2n c4 b2 e4 ds2d d d2 g4 f2d e4 e e a2 ad g2 g4 b2d a a g2s g4 d d d2 d4 There are a few new things Style SATB to indicate four voice choral music on two staves Sharps for the key signature of course there is Flats available too Meter for the time signa ture and Space 9 to indicate that there should be nine interlines of extra space between the Rainer Dunker s musixlyr package on which M Tx depends can now be used directly with PMX staves If there are more than two staves you can prescribe a different extra distance for eac
41. music is essential e The environment Score is used to include each piece It takes two arguments the first will appear in the list of contents and as a running page heading the second is the name of the tex file As usual the extension tex may be omitted There is also an environment score which is less convenient but more flexible it has no arguments reads in nothing puts nothing in the table of contents and does not change the running page heading Use it when you need a special lyrics font e g begin score headingandcontents Loof nou die Heer sffamily input loofnou end score A 17 E 2 Collections of morsels The situation is a little different when the pieces are so short that more than one of them fit on one page For these use the environment excerpts as in the following example documentclass article usepackage mtxlatex charter mtxlatex pagestylefempty renewcommand writebarno rule Opt 12pt begin document beginfexcerpts input dona tex vskip 8mm input sanctus tex vskip 8mm input viva tex newpage end excerpts end document The rest of the procedure is the same as for collections of longer pieces You can see the finished product in halleluja pdf Some points to note e The excerpts environment redefines the heading fonts to more modest sizes e A page break should be made before quitting the environment e The pieces do not have bar numbers but space should be reserved for t
42. n job of M Tx the notes are modified in various ways e Octave is inserted into the first note of each voice depending on the Octave command or if none is supplied on the clef Absolute octave numbers are not recognized by M Tx and may cause unexpected side effects e If a line is vocal an a is inserted into quavers and shorter notes when not under slurs to protect them from being beamed e Duration codes are inserted into all notes and rests before any serious processing is done e Long short note groups are expanded into separate notes Although PMX allows these shortcuts lyrics cannot be properly synchronized unless the groups are expanded e PMX syntax allows great freedom in the order in which different parts of a node are coded M Tx is not aware of all the subtleties but extracts only those parts of which it needs to be aware and reassembles the note afterwards 0 54 e Chord lines are expanded into standard PMX code and inserted into the main line for each voice Other ways in which an M Tx score differs from a native PMX score in more than layout are a bar line is required for a pickup repeat bars are coded by the ABC2MTEX symbols instead of R1 etc you don t need to insert a meter change for an incomplete final bar M Tx does it All the ability of PMX to pass through TEX including MusiXTEX commands is still there You might for example like to read the musix1yr documentation for a large variety of ways t
43. nal meterC it can be restored by let meterC oldmeterC The excerpt illustrates some sophisticated PMX features too Since the gt ornament on the bottom stave goes above the stave by default we need to move it down explicitly The beamed eighths look better with a horizontal beam which is enforced by h Finally the two ties are individually numbered to allow this the chordal note must come on a music line A 13 D 6 Extra text after the piece Meter 3 4 Title Song of May Flats 1 Style Singer Systems 2 Space 10 hh let endpiecesav endpiece def endpiece endpiecesav input lyrics input notes 0 8 d4e gl Cde gl fe f d2r4 L In ver na lis tem po ris L Dum re ces sum fri go ris fg alCag f g2d g2 r4 g d4 d2 d4 dc bl a2 ra L or tu lae ta bun do ter rae ma ris ne mo ris L nun ti at hi run do vi gor re dit cor po ris 2a4 Cbadgl Cfe fld2r4 Cfg dal Cag f gad g2r4 de cus ad est de fo ris re no va to mun do E 0a L ce dit do lor pec to ris tem po re iu cun do When typesetting a vocal composition you may sometimes want to put only the text of the initial stanza into your score and let the remaining part of the lyrics be printed below the score You might also want to add some notes or comments Apparently this is not possible according to the set of commands available for M Tx and PMX There is however a workaround to do things like that The trick is to look for a com
44. nally to make the second box open ended you must enter Vx at the point you want it to be done If you forget to enter the Vx after your last volta box you will get a strange unwanted volta box at the end of your piece This example also illustrates the interplay between Space and 6 required for proper spacing of lyrics when there is stuff above the staves Contributed by Joel Hunsberger D 2 Music size Bars line 2 Style Solo Meter m3400 Size 29pt hh w3 Ti U lt v sf sf sf cit rgg Laf8g rbo lco EETL ELE WU gk g The above does not look quite right for a complicated reason A piece as a whole has a basic music size and then each stave can have its own local size The local size affects everything on the stave itself but not the annotations ornaments etc The range of legal basic sizes is quite small PMX allows only 16 point and 20 point In this example the basic size is 20 point and the local size 29 point To get the perfectly matched annotations displayed on the title page of this manual the input looks like this Bars line 2 Style Solo Meter m3400 w3 Ti Largemusicsize U lt v 2 sf sf sf cit rgg Laf8g rbo lco MusiXTEX has four size commands relative the basic size called Nnormalsize These com mands affect all music fonts They are smallmusicsize 13pt 16pt normalmusicsize 16pt 20pt largemusic
45. ngle hard space when some instrument in the middle should not have a name 10 You will probably also need the 1ndent command to specify the indentation required to provide space for the names E g Indent 0 12 says the indentation should be 1296 of the music width 3 Shortcuts This section introduces shortcuts for things that are perfectly possible in other ways but a little clumsy 3 1 Chords An isolated chord in the middle of a melodic line is best treated by the PMX construction of chordal notes with the z prefix e g c ze zg zc for a C major chord Sometimes a whole string of successive chords appears as in the introduction to Schubert s song Der Tod und das M dchen You can see that the coding for this can become quite cumbersome Therefore M Tx allows you to put the chordal notes on a second line as shown below ef e e o e e ey S E e P jc 3 E e E t Z e jc 3 ey C e e e o e e e 4 eS e 9 Q a E E o e e e Style PianoBass PianoBass Voices RH LH Clefs F F Continuo Meter C Flats 1 f2 g4e f2a4 ala2 f4e f2 f4e f2 g4e f2a4 ala2 f4e C ad bd gd ad gle f gle ad acs ad d gd ad bd gd ad gle f gle ad acs d2 d4 d d2d4 a a2 a4a a2 d4 d d2 d4 d d2 d4 ala2 adal C
46. o fine tune horizontal lyrics placement but I can promise that you hardly ever will need to do horizontal tuning except to align multi verse lyrics as in Section 2 2 D Annotated examples D 1 Voltas T Now to learn this vol ta thing lead up to the first end ing 1 2 m Try to write a next end ing 8 Try to learn more sim ple TeX P M X Now it s time to end the test so I wish you all the best Meter 4 4 Style Singer Bars Line 4 Size 16 Space 6 0 4 c4 c gtglaag2 f4feel Viddc2 L Now to learn this vol ta thing lead up to the first end ing Vb2 d4 d c2 L next end ing Vx g4 gf L Try to write a L Try to learn more Vieed2 Vb2 e4 e d2 L sim ple TeX P M X Vx c4 c gtg laag2 f4feelddc2 L Now it s time to end the test so I wish you all the best The main rule is put every V command in the bottom voice at the start of a measure after the bar line if any but before the first note and don t try to use more than one at a time the new volta automatically closes the old one Volta signs in other voices are silently ignored When reading the PMX manual remember that your last part will become the first part for PMX In the above example V1 starts a volta box but to get the first volta box to be closed at the end you must later say Vb Also to get the text 2 into the second ending box you add the 2 after the Vb to make Vb2 Fi
47. o define precisely how long an elemskip is The important thing about them is that they stretch or shrink with spacing of the notes so that if say a half note is followed by two elemskips in one place it will be followed by two elemskips everywhere 13 Similarly in compound meter passages containing long and short notes require frequent duration changes 6 8 c8 gi c8 d1 c8 gi c8 d1 c8d The shorthand notation for this reads 6 8 c8 g c d c g c d cd 3 5 Barless music Many old hymn tunes do not fit into the modern pattern of regular bars You could get this effect by carefully counting the length of each music line and issuing your own blind meter change instructions Instead specify in the preamble that you have zero beats per bar E g Meter 0 4 means that each paragraph of music should be treated as a single bar and that the basic counting unit is a quarter note You need not issue any other meter change instructions M Tx will check that each of the lines in the paragraph have the same total duration which must a multiple of the specified counting unit 3 6 Sticky ornaments and suffixes You may need to mark a whole run of notes as staccato To do so put o instead of o after the first staccato note and o after the last one This method also works with tenuto and all the other ornaments in B 3 The stickyness of ornaments lasts only till the end of the bar On notes and rests there are many possible suffixes some of which you have
48. on t want to type two digits for something so common as a semiquaver A whole note is denoted by 0 which looks a bit like a printed semibreve Do you think this looks good Much better than handwritten You are right but look at the following version Riff in C W A Mozart 1756 1791 A e There is a heading the notes are not stretched out so much and the two staves of the piano are grouped together To achieve this the input looks as follows Title Riff inC Composer W A Mozart 1756 1791 Style piano 4 wi20m c2 el g b4d cid c2 c8 gstegc gtregldgfig c gteg The notes are exactly the same as before but there is an introductory paragraph or preamble that specifies what to do with them A paragraph in M Tx is a group of consecutive lines set apart by one or more blank lines Most of the paragraphs contain notes but the printed music will not necessarily be broken at the same places as the paragraphs Only in the simplest cases every music line in the paragraph starts with what might be a note are you allowed to omit the preamble The preamble lines in this example are self explanatory The one mysterious line is the one starting with at the top of the music paragraph The present implementation of M Tx acts as a front end to the PMX program Things that can be done easily in PMX are n
49. or instance you may use a PMX formatted meter change word E g n3 4 0 0 gives a blind meter change one that takes effect but is not printed See the PMX manual This is also legal in the preamble Meter command You may not in troduce a meter change directly to PMX via a 4 command M Tx must know about it too 1 3 Beams and slurs Thanks to PMX beams in instrumental voices are automatic M Tx does however recognize that it is customary in vocal music to use beams only when the notes in question are sung to the same single syllable So if you select a style like SATB or Singer that involves voices notes will normally appear unbeamed except those that appear under slurs To override this you need to use the PMX forced beam feature e g c d or start M Tx with the b compiler option Section C 2 See Section 2 3 on how to fine tune beams and Appendix D 4 for some examples involving lyrics The slur notation is similar to forced beams but uses parentheses Look at the second system of the same song m ere 6 EE E g L rt f PF f PF f F eor Fe fF ge trek tot U deur boor de SY Lam van God ek kom Op U be lof te steun ek bly Lam Yan God ek kom Dan wy ek my vir e wig Heer Lam van God ek kom pad d EN EN EN EE ee OOO e FA E e Omitting th
50. ores it is probably advisable to change texmf cnf so that save size 10000 and run initex E 1 Collections of complete pieces Suppose you need to make a document containing several complete pieces with perhaps a title page a foreword and an afterword like a typical published book of piano pieces or songs 1 Prepare a tex file for each separate piece using the methods described previously and be sure that it is fully debugged and looks the way you want it using the standard tex musixflx tex compiling cycle 2 Write a BIEX file looking something like this documentclass a4paper article usepackage mtxlatex times mtxlatex pagestylefheadings titlef Huge Halleluja 2ex Large textit Anthems for unaccompanied church choir SATB 5ex author Large Edited by Dirk Laurie date begin document maketitle thispagestylefempty tableofcontents section Foreword The scores in this booklet were edited from nearly illegible photocopies of crudely duplicated manuscripts themselves made by inexpert copyists from unknown originals in the days before photo copying machines existed Any remaining errors are the responsibility of the author Unfortunately the available sources did not specify who the composers and lyrics writers of these anthems are pagebreak A 16 0 54 begin Score Kroon Hom kroonhom end Score begin Score Loof nou die Heer loofnou end Score
51. ot re invented but instead the facility is provided to pass information directly to PMX The PMX command w120m means width 120 millimetres A short tutorial on PMX appears in Appendix B A few words on technical terms to make sure that we know what we are talking about e A line is a text line of typed music e A word is a string of consecutive non blank characters separated by blanks from other words on the same line e A stave is the familiar group of five closely spaced parallel lines on which music is written e A voice is a melodic strand of music of which there may be either one or two per stave Experienced PMX users please note the PMX manual uses voice as a synonym for stave and line of music for what I call a voice e An instrument corresponds either to a single stave or to a group of two or more adjacent staves linked together with a brace 1 usually representing a single instrument like a piano e A system is a group of staves for the various voices that are heard at the same time 1 1 Lyrics I wrote the M Tx converter because lyrics are not part of the PMX design It used to be a major effort to obtain pretty output like the following Net soos ek is Charlotte Elliott A s es Por Aa 1 Net soos ek is geen hulp na by al leen U bloed ge stort vir my 2 Net soos e
52. r notes or rests on that line The same rest will be printed on all staves You can tune the appearance of the rest by appending a signed integer to the word e g rm19 18 Roughly speaking this moves the front end of the rest to the right by 18 points Since multibar rests can have several shapes and may even contain as many as three separate symbols in the case of rm7 it is difficult to describe precisely what happens and you are advised to experiment 3 8 Skipping portions of a score You may have various reasons for wanting M Tx to omit one or more lines of your score There are several ways to do so of which the simplest is the comment symbol that you have met 14 before which skips that one line A line starting with SUSPEND all in capitals at the start of a paragraph tells M Tx to discard all following paragraphs until a line starting with RESUME all in capitals is found at the start of a paragraph The material in between must still be organized into paragraphs that are not too large see Appendix C 3 but need not in any other way conform to M Tx input rules A line starting with Only defines a subset of line numbers e g Only 1 3 7 9 defines the set 1 3 4 5 6 7 9 Only the corresponding lines from all non lyrics paragraphs after the paragraph containing the Only are processed until another Only is found Any paragraph containing an Only is always fully taken into account it is not subjected to the masking action of any Only
53. r sharp pizzicato fermata above fd fermata down The suffixes staccato and tenuto differ from the others by being set close to the note not off stave There are several more in PMX and many others in MusiXTEX Clef change You get a small clef at the point where the clef change occurs and a big one at the start of the next line The clef change word begins with C The suffix t places middle C on line of the stave where 1 is the bottom line and 5 the top An appropriate clef is selected automatically e g CO is the G clef treble and C6 is the F clef bass Voltas These are the labels to mark sections of the score that are not played at every repeat You put V1 to indicate that a bracket containing the number 1 should appear above the bar in question Since PMX wants all such indications in the bottom voice only they are deleted by the M Tx preprocessor if found elsewhere See Appendix D 1 Key change Put K 0 2 in a music line where a key change to two flats should occur As with voltas this indication is deleted if not in the bottom voice B 4 Useful things to put on lines Most of the following commands should appear in the first music paragraph or on a PMX pream ble command line Some of them are actually raw MusDCIEX consult the MusiXTpX manual for other interesting commands 744 lines in the preamble are treated a little differently see Appendix C 4 Line page and movement breaks Put L6 above a paragr
54. r word consisting of a bar symbol on a chord line indicates that no more chords appear in the current bar even though one or more melodic notes are still left In that case you do not need a for the missing chords Don t use bar symbols on a chord line just to separate bars when there are no missing chords Two or more consecutive such words indicate one or more bars with no chords If the very first word on a chord line is a bar symbol the first bar has no chords e You can get an arpeggio sign wavy line in front of the whole chord including the melodic note by starting the chord word with a question mark e g ad instead of ad in the first chord above would have put an arpeggio sign in front of all three notes For more complicated arpeggio constructions you need to put signs on the music lines themselves consult the PMX manual 3 2 Expression marks and other annotations Annotations and interpretation marks p f rit cresc and so on are inserted using lines like lyrics lines but with U for Uptext instead of L Note though that uptext lines are synchronized with rests as well as notes whereas lyrics are synchronized with notes only The normal position for an uptext line is above the music line to which it applies if it appears anywhere else the label must include the voice name or number I ll speak of an uptext voice to refer to the totality of uptext lines no more than one per paragraph associated with a partic
55. section Technical notes The score was typeset by the author using his own MTx typesetting program which in turn relies on the programs PMX by Don Simons MusiX TeX by Daniel Taupin textit fet al LaTeX by Leslie Lamport and TeX by Donald Knuth end document 3 Use a latex musixflx latex compiling cycle to make the finished document 4 If you make small changes in the BIZ part only a single PBIZ pass is sufficient unless the page numbering has changed You can see the finished product in halleluja pdf Some points to note e The package mtxlatex comes with M Tx You must put the command mtxlatex in the preamble e The package times comes with standard distributions You could use any BEIEX2 font package here The times font is quite narrow and therefore useful when the lyrics are crowded If you do use a font a package load it after mtxlatex e Npagestyle headings puts page numbers and running headings at the top of the page e To change fonts use pure BIEX 2e font change commands as above Don t try to use Vit bf etc Briefly subject to what fonts you have installed you can independently change size Ntiny scriptsize footnotesize small normalsize Marge Large LARGE huge Huge shape upshape itshape slshape scshape family rmfamily sffamily ttfamily series mdseries bfseries For a full description see any good BIEX 2 manual e The blank line before the first piece of
56. size 20pt 24pt Largemusicsize 24pt 29pt There is no tinymusicsize although several of the music fonts are individually available in 11 point size A 10 D 3 A psalm tune Psalm 42 Ainsi que la biche r e 4 Pad e e e l e e e o S G Soos n hert in dor re stre ke skreeu end dors na die ge not van die hel der wa ter be ke skreeu my siel na U 0 God e t e e e P e e e m e le e d Ja my siel dors na die Heer na die Le wens bron Wan neer E s e e a e e e e J lt sal ek sien in klaar aan skou e Op die Heer is my ver trou e Meter 0 2 Style Singer Sharps 1 Title Psalm 42 textit normalsize Ainsi que la biche r ee Space 9 7 g2 a4 b2 al g f e2 d2 caesura g2 a4 b2 c4 b2 a g L Soos n hert in dor re stre ke skreeu end dors na die ge not L van die hel der wa ter be ke skreeu my siel na U o God Space 6 0 2 b2 b4 d2 c4 b a b2 NcaesuraN d2 d4 e2 d4 c b a2 L Ja my siel dors na die Heer na die Le wens bron Wan neer b2 d4 c2 b4 g a b2 g2 caesura b2 b4 c2 bd a g f2 g2 L sal ek sien in klaar aan skou e Op die Heer is my ver trou e e Meter 0 2 indicates counting in half notes but no bar lines e Line breaks in the Title are made by e Different spacing is used in
57. ss whether the word is a dynamic indication like mp sf rfz etc and will use the MusiXTEX ppff font for it The current algorithm is highly unsophisticated if all the letters in a word come from the list fmprsz it is diagnosed as a dynamic indication e A more permanent font change is indicated by a word like bf or it no backslash the prepmx program will put it in Every word of that uptext voice except ppff words will be set in the indicated font Each uptext voice retains its own font which remains in effect even after the paragraph in which it appears e You can indicate crescendo and decrescendo signs in uptext by two methods 1 Put lt or gt where the sign starts and lt or gt where it ends This feature gives unpredictable results when you try to use it in more than one voice at the same time 2 Put e g 180r gt 7 where the sign starts The number gives the length of the crescendo in elementary skip units or elemskips 3 3 Lyrics paragraphs You may prefer to have all the lyrics for a particular voice together in one paragraph To do this the first line of the paragraph consists of a name for the group of lyrics in braces e g verse1 When you later wish to use these lyrics you put a list of names on a lyrics line where you would normally have put the lyrics e g L verse1 verse2 replaces L Lyr ics for the first verse L Lyr ics for the second verse You do not repeat this instruction
58. sure on your system administrator You will need Rainer Dunker s musixlyr extension package version 2 0 or later This package is available with full documentation in the add ons subdirectory of the Archive and you should get it if you need more of its features than those accessible from M Tx A A My M Tx translator is written in Turbo Pascal Since this language is not portable the distribution provides a C translation made by Dave Gillespie s Pascal to C converter and a bit of post translation hacking You will need a C compiler that accepts ANSI C source code I also supply a binary executable for MS DOS made directly from the Pascal source which can run in a DOS shell under Windows Once you have all the software make an M Tx file with extension mtx using your normal text editor It must be an editor that respects the line boundaries and empty lines that you type in in other words something fairly primitive not an upmarket word processor Run the pro gram prepmx with argument basename when your file is called basename mtx The output will be a file basename pmx which then goes through PMX and TEX The error detection capabilities of prepmx are reasonable but not extensive much is passed through unexamined to PMX C 2 The prepnx command line You could also supply other arguments on the command line A complicated command line in Unix replace by in DOS might be prepmx bvn mysong home dirk texinput home dirk mtx mystyles
59. tp www gmd de Music Werner s work is still being carried on but it requires three people to fill his shoes Maurizio Codogno is the mailing list administrator Christian Mondrup the maintainer of the software archive and Don Simons the maintainer of the sheet music archive My wife Trienke has had to suffer many effectively husbandless evenings and weekends while I hammered the program and documentation into good enough shape to be able to offer it around A Where to find help M Ix is the tip of an iceberg Things can go wrong at many levels Fortunately here are many ways to get information and help e Consult the Table of Contents and index in search of a likely looking topic e The annotated examples might be useful e There is a file FAQ in the distribution that contains the sort of questions that new users often ask e The packages on which M Tx relies all have their own reference manuals Look for the following files PMX pmx230 pdf ref230 pdf these names will obviously be different if your PMX is not Version 2 30 musixlyr musixlyr pdf MusiXIpX musixdoc dvi e Consult the mailing list archive at http icking music archive sunsite dk mailinglist archive e Join the mailing list by sending an e mail message to tex music sunsite dk with the word subscribe as subject no message body needed B Ashort PMX tutorial This section describes the parts of PMX that you are likely to need when coding scores in M
60. txt This line contains switches recognized by the leading hyphen a basename the directory where the final tex file will be put if you omit it files go in the current directory and the file where I keep my own styles if omitted the file mtxstyle txt in the current directory is used if there is one Instead of putting the switches as here on the command line you can specify them in a preamble 0ptions line which takes precedence over the command line b Don t unbeam eighth notes and shorter even when the style is vocal or choral c Main music lines only ignore chords f Use tonic sol fa note names d r m f s 1 t for do re mi fa sol la ti This will be translated to the usual note names c d e f g a bin C major Use the PMX transposition feature to obtain the desired key Only the basic note names are supported you should not use the sol fa chromatic note names e g re ma but the basic sol fa note names with PMX accidentals e g ds ef This option conflicts in some cases with other uses of these letters To retain the standard meaning in sol fa mode precede the word with a e g use r for a rest since r translates to a d i Ignore errors Default behaviour is to stop on the first error Errors are clearly marked with ERROR any other message printed is informative or a warning only m Music only ignore lyrics n Indent first system and print default instrument names t Ignore uptext lines
61. ular voice e Spacers and bar symbols work for uptext in exactly the same way as for chords see Section 3 1 e Vertical adjustment signs starting with like 0 v 0 4 0 4 0 4 may appear in uptext lines and have the same effect on the position of the uptext as in the fine tuning of lyrics see Section 2 2 The only difference is that these signs appear in the uptext line itself whereas the lyrics adjustments appear in the corresponding music line A line starting U Qv is actually a downtext line Each uptext voice retains its own adjustments which remain in effect even after the paragraph in which they appear e Uptext lines may also have horizontal adjustment signs namely 6 and 6 There are three possible positions for aligning uptext to a note left right and centre The default position is to align to the right but the horizontal adjustment shifts the position in the indicated direction e g one causes centred uptext and another lt causes uptext extending to the left of the note Yet a third lt will be ignored Here too each uptext voice retains its own adjustments which remain in effect even after the paragraph in which they appear e Uptext lines are useful for indicating guitar chords To make this easier the sharp character may be used on an uptext line as a normal text character usually in TEX you need to get it and the character is used to indicate a b 12 e The preprocessor tries to gue
62. ve by giving the notes of the lower voice first followed by and the notes of the upper voice This construct works in M Tx too One interline is the distance between two lines in a stave The normal distance between staves is five interlines but sometimes extra space on a page is distributed between the staves you may need to experiment 4 when only one voice for the stave was specified in the style but for just one bar at a time such a bar must be terminated by a bar line Use it only for very short stretches You will probably need to set the octave in the first note using If you are using PMX features that are not recognized by M Tx but simply passed through you may need a bar line to tell M Tx to which bar they belong Apart from the final blind meter change that is automatically made if required you can also define other meter changes The rules are The meter change may only occur at the very beginning of a bar after a full bar of the meter previously in effect and must be made in all voices In particular any key change volta indication etc must come after the meter change also the bar following the pickup may not contain a meter change but must have the length specified in the preamble The normal meter change word looks like a fraction e g 3 4 This always gives a visible meter change If the printed meter symbol looks different from the logical one you want a big C in stead of 4 over 4 f
63. xample if you put PMX 1155 55 55 55t96b56 72 48 80v127 100 73 46 in your preamble a MIDI file will be generated in which all four instruments are played on MIDI instrument number 54 if you use the default instruments together with Timidity this means Voices at a tempo of 96 quarter notes to a minute with MIDI balances of 56 72 48 and 80 centre is 64 and MIDI velocities of 127 100 73 and 46 respectively More details appear in the PMX manual C How to get and use M Tx Sorry this section assumes that you have some knowledge of computers Get a TpX pert to help you if necessary C 1 Installation The primary official source for all the software you need is the MusiXTEX Archive at http icking music archive sunsite dk mailinglist archive in the music musixtex directory and its subdirectories Copies spread from there to other official CTAN Comprehensive TEX Archive Network sites M Tx is in the software mtx subdi rectory Read the README file that comes with the M Tx zip file To use M Tx you need a working PMX installation version 2 3 0 or later although many scores will work with earlier versions which is in the software pmx subdirectory of the Archive PMX itself is a preprocessor to Daniel Taupin s MusiXTpX Version T 101 was used to prepare this manual which is in the MusiXT X Archive directory itself All of these depend on Donald Knuth s TEX typesetting package If your system does not already have TEX put pres
64. xstyle txt file Starting with M Tx 0 42 you can have up to 15 voices using up to 15 staves For each two voice stave the number of staves you can have goes down by 1 The MS DOS executable supplied in the package made directly from the Pascal sources can only accept paragraphs no more than 50 lines long This restriction is caused by Turbo Pascal s 64KB limit on data segments It is possible to make a full sized executable under Windows 95 98 by compiling the C sources with the Gnu C compiler Other limitations are described in the PMX documentation C 3 1 Compatibility Scores made using M Tx 0 52 should still work Older scores might need to be revised Some command line options allowed in M Tx 0 52 have been removed from the documen tation Although still supported at present by the software they should not be used The M Tx 0 52 documentation stated falsely The default duration at the completion of a line is that of the last note appearing at that stage which in the case of an expanded group is the shorter note Since this is opposite to what happens during the line itself a line ending with a group should have an explicit duration code for the first note on the next line for that voice Actually duration is taken from what you code so e g c4 d will leave the duration code as 4 Of course explicitly coding the duration can never hurt C 3 2 Unsupported features of MusixTEX and PMX Unlike MusiXT X itself which is stabl
65. y using void syllables and extension rules e g bi e HA e fg ad al g8f ede id L She is a dan ge rous wo man She is a dan gerouswoman L yow 1 get a bro ken heart Yowllgeta bro ken heart The trailing underscore on heart takes the place of a syllable of lyrics and on a longer note would produces a lyrics rule that extends to the end of the melisma You can use as many underscores as required for very long melismas you can code e g Ah 6 instead of Ah The converse of this situation is that you want M Tx to make a melisma but you don t want a visible slur Code the slur begin as or and the slur end as or This gives a blind slur invisible but having the same effect on lyrics as a normal slur Blind slurs should not have any other tuning marks 0 54 1 4 More complicated lyrics Lines of lyrics that start with L are set in the middle between two staves or below the bottom stave and are aligned with the notes of the voice under which they appear in the input file in this case the alto Such lines are referred to as normal lyrics lines Sometimes different words apply to different voices as in the last line of the song ley 3 m l s gt S ii BRI TET FT Net soos ek is net soos ek is O Lam van God ek kom Net soos ek is O

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