Down the Rabbit Hole

Being of unsound mind, I decided to investigate that dark and frightening world known as Gregorian Chant notation software. Consider this your official warning: that way lies madness.

So far as I could determine, there are six options:

1. Chanter
2. Gregoire
3. GregEdit
4. Caeciliae
5. Gregorio
6. Build a time machine, go back to the sixth century, teach Pope Gregory the Great modern music notation, then come back to the present and use MuseScore, because Gregorian notation will never have existed.

So far as I can determine, option 6 is the simplest and least frustrating method.

What brought this on was a desire to be able to make fresh copies of the chant I use in choir. Sometimes, a chant will be photocopied to illegibility. Sometimes, I swear that we're using the original copies written by Brother McShakyhands of the Order of Blind Friars as he was dying of bubonic plague in the 13th century. Either way, sometimes it's nice to be able to fix up a score.

As our test case, I'll see which software can best duplicate the Alleluia Tone VIII that I've been using:

Chanter

Chanter is a simple Gregorian Chant notation program. Released under the GNU license, it is free and available for Windows. Simple to install, straightforward to use, but severely limited. While you can choose the clef, and the lyric-adding feature is not too difficult, it supports adding only punctum, with limited decorator marks (which cannot be applied to punctum inclinatum). You cannot add podatus, clivis, porrectus, or torcullus. This is kind of a show-stopper.

From the Chanter website, it looks like the last update was 2006, so it's probably a dead project.

Still, I was able to produce this:

It has printing support, so you could use that to export to PDF (with CutePDF or similar), however, the printing is always messed up, with gibberish characters showing up through out.

Gregoire

Gregoire is a piece of software for Windows written by a French Benedictine monk for his personal use. However, he released it due to popular demand.

From the screenshots, it looks nice, but I can't tell you anything about it:

I don't think I even have access to a non-64-bit computer anymore. And I don't feel like writing the French monk saying "um, Mr. Monk? I know you're busy with praying and contemplation and praying and being holy, but could you please re-compile the code for 64-bit OSes? Thanks."

GregEdit

GregEdit is another application written at a French monastery. Unlike Gregoire, a license costs $186, though you can use the demo for free. Like Gregoire, the screenshots look nice (nicer, even), and just like Gregoire, I can't verify that. GregEdit is written for Mac, and while they do provide a Mac Emulator for PC users (for Mac OS 8.6; it's recommended that you have a "powerful" system of at least a 200Mhz Pentium), after struggling and fighting with the emulator (which has not been tested beyond XP) without getting it to work, I gave up.

Really? You sure about that? Could you, I dunno, double check that for me?

Caeciliae

Caeciliae is a bit more interesting than the first three. It's not a program, but rather a font. This means you use it in a word processor and just type letter codes corresponding to the nuemes you want. What's cool is it's an OpenType font, so different key combinations will produce different neumes. For instance "p" inserts a punctum, but the position of the punctum is determined by the preceding character. "1p" inserts a punctum on the bottom staff line while "4p" will insert it in the space between the middle staff lines. "P" inserts a podatus and the two preceding numbers indicate where the lower and upper notes of the podatus appear. So "17P" inserts a podatus spanning from the bottom to top staff lines.

Using this method, you can very quickly and easily (once you learn the keys, but the manual is very helpful for that) type up a chant. The biggest drawback to Caeciliae is software compatibility. Very few programs support the intelligent features of OpenType fonts, and mostly publishing software. I hear Word supports it, but I don't have Word on my home PC. OpenOffice does not. Ironically, the program with the best OpenType support (according to the Caeciliae manual) is Notepad. Yep, good old Notepad. Unfortunately, the layout abilities of Notepad stink, to use a technical term, and since you can't mix fonts, you can't add the lyrics. However, using Notepad, I was able to create this.

The cool thing is that's just text. Specifically, it's:

5d==11p23P==3cH2p-3p4q5p4p==35P-5pI-5p==56P-5n-3ni'32C.=-||=-1p23P==3cH2p-3p4q5p4p==35P-5pI-5p==56P-5n-3ni'32C.=-;=45P-23P-2n1n0.=3p4q45X5P-54C=2p25x5p53x3p'43C'32C.==||

=1p23P==3cH2p-3p4q5p4p==35P-5pI-5p==56P-5n-3ni'32C.=-;=45P-23P-2n1n0.=3p4q45X5P-54C=2p25x5p53x3p'43C'32C.==||

("d" sets the cleff, "5" tells the position of it. "=" just inserts empty staff, for spacing purposes. "1p" puts a punctum on the lowest staff line; "23P" puts a podatus. "3c" puts the first note of a clivis, and "H" puts a horizontal episema over the previous note, "q" is for quilisma, "n" is for punctum inclinatum, "i" is for a vertical episema (ictus), and "." is for punctum mora, etc.)



Screenshotting this and transferring it to OpenOffice Writer via Paint.Net (for cropping), I was able to put together a PDF file. Check it out:

When I get in to work on Monday, I'll check to see if Word 2010 supports OpenType features.

Gregorio

Gregorio. Where to begin. Difficult. Cumbersome. Causes sentence fragments.

Firstly, it has no GUI. It is not a program so much as it is a programming language. From the website:

The Gregorio project offers tools for the typesetting of Gregorian chant. These tools include: 

• gabc: a brief notation for representing Gregorian chant
• GregorioTeX: a TeX style for typesetting scores
• GregorioXML: an XML representation of a Gregorian chant score

The main work of the Gregorio project is the software program gregorio, which can manipulate files in gabc notation and convert them into OpusTeX, GregorioTeX, or GregorioXML files. 

Together, these tools, added to a LaTeX installation, make it easy to typeset works of Gregorian chant and produce output in PDF or Postscript format, for printing or for incorporation into larger documents.

Got that? You write code to define the chant. Then you compile that into a format that can be read by another program, which then compiles it into an actual, useful PDF file.

Gregorio is based on LaTeX, which is a word-processor alternative. It is based on TeX, which is a programming language created by Donald E. Knuth in 1977 for creating documents. From the LaTeX website:

LaTeX is not a word processor! Instead, LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the right content.... 

[I]n most typesetting or word-processing systems, the author would have to decide what layout to use, so would select (say) 18pt Times Roman for the title, 12pt Times Italic for the name, and so on. This has two results: authors wasting their time with designs; and a lot of badly designed documents! 

LaTeX is based on the idea that it is better to leave document design to document designers, and to let authors get on with writing documents.

Got that? Instead of having to, y'know, fiddle with a GUI to choose fonts and margins and stuff, LaTeX just makes you learn a programming language to do all that. It takes a certain kind of mind to look at a word processor and say, "y'know what would make this more efficient? Removing the GUI and replacing it with code!" So, with LaTeX, authors don't have to be document designers. Instead, they have to be programmers. (I can see the programmer's thought process behind this; "all this graphical stuff is so hard! Why don't we just reduce it to a programming language? That's easy; anybody can learn it.)

So with Gregorio, you have to write code (which is not all that different from Caeciliae's character combos). It might look like this:

So much simpler than a silly word processor!

You then use the program Gregorio to compile that into a *.tex file. (Normally, you would invoke gregorio from a command line, but there is a Windows GUI program called TeXworks for wusses, noobs, and girly-men.)

You can then use this *.tex file, combined with another *.tex file for a template in a TeX program to compile a PDF file. Simple, really.

The problem I ran into here was that Gregorio recommends you install TeXLive as your TeX compiler. The default install for TeXLive is 4GB. Yes. 4GB. For a programming language. (At least it isn't Microsoft Office!) The full installer crashed on my computer ("perl.exe has encountered an error and will be shut down") so I had to use the custom installer, which allowed me to trim out some unnecessary documentation in other languages, so I cut the install down to 2.6GB.

Once TeXLive is installed, you can install Gregorio. The Gregorio installer is automatically supposed to configure TeXLive, but here's where I ran into problems. Gregorio kept giving error messages that it couldn't find certain TeXLive files, and vice versa. The programs don't talk well with each other, and each kept giving "file not found" messages, and yet I could look in the programs' corresponding directories and find the files they couldn't. There didn't appear to be an easy way to get the programs to talk to each other, and there was no documentation on telling them how to find each other.

In the end, I got a show-stopping error message while trying to compile the example file ("PopulusSion") that comes with Gregorio:


! Undefined control sequence.
<argument> C:\Program Files (x86)\gregorio \tex \gregoriotex
l.14 \usepackage {fullpage} % to reduce the margins

This means absolutely nothing to me. I searched their support archives but didn't turn up anything useful. I emailed their user group for help, but if these are a bunch of Linux nerds, they'll likely just tell me to RTFM. Although since this is a group of Gregorian Chant Linux nerds, maybe they'll be more Christian and tell me to RTFM in Latin. (Not sure if they will, in Latin, tell me to RTFM or, if they will tell me to RTFM, which is in Latin.)

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So that's a round-up of the options for Gregorian chant notation. I'll let you know how the time machine goes.