Terry Riley's In C (Lilypond)

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

Installation

Using the generated SVGs in your own Javascript projects is as simple as adding the following line to an .npmrc file at the root of your project:

@loyola-university-tech-ensemble:registry=https://npm.pkg.github.com

This will add the GitHub registry to your project for our packages, then you can install this package normally:

$ npm install @loyola-university-tech-ensemble/in-c-phrases-ly

The package currently only exports the static path of the package, which is subject to change depending on how it will be used in dependent projects. If you are using Webpack you should be able to alias the package for easy access to SVG paths in JS.

const phrasesPath = require('@loyola-university-tech-ensemble/in-c-phrases-ly').default;
// or in ES6
import phrasesPath from '@loyola-university-tech-ensemble/in-c-phrases-ly';

File Structure

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

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

Locally Generating SVGs

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

Running the build script at the root of the repo will generate all of the SVGs and put them in a build/ directory.

$ ./build.sh

Lilypond can also generate PDFs and PNGs of the phrases, just modify the build script to suit your needs.