+@comment @c -*-texinfo-*-
@node Preface
-@chapter Preface
+@unnumbered Preface
-[talk about:
-why lily, history, about manual, call for feedback on manual and
-program.
-Inspiration from ../misc/ ?
-]
+It must have been during a rehearsal of the EJE (Eindhoven Youth
+Orchestra), somewhere in 1995 that Jan, one of the cranked violists
+told Han-Wen, one of the distorted French horn players, about the
+grand new project he was working on. It was an automated system for
+printing music (to be precise, it was MPP, a preprocessor for
+MusiXTeX). As it happened, Han-Wen accidentally wanted to print out
+some parts from a score, so he started looking at the software, and he
+quickly got hooked. It was decided that MPP was a dead end. After
+lots of philosophizing and heated e-mail exchanges Han-Wen started
+LilyPond in 1996. This time, Jan got sucked into Han-Wen's new
+project.
+
+In some ways, developing a computer program is like learning to play
+an instrument. In the beginning, discovering how it works is fun, and
+the things you can't do are challenging. After the initial excitement,
+you have to practice and practice. Scales and studies can be dull, and
+if you aren't motivated by others---teachers, conductors or
+audience---it is very tempting to give up. You continue, and gradually
+playing becomes a part of your life. Some days it comes naturally, and
+it's wonderful, and on some days it just doesn't work, but you keep
+playing, day after day.
+
+Like making music, working on LilyPond is can be dull work, and on
+some days it feels like plodding through a morass of
+bugs. Nevertheless, it has become a part of our life, and we keep
+doing it. Probably the most important motivation is that our program
+actually does something useful for people. When we browse around the
+net we find many people that use LilyPond, and use it to produce
+impressive pieces of sheet music. Seeing that still feels unreal, but
+in a very pleasant way.
+
+Our users not only give us good vibes by using our program, many of
+them also help us by giving suggestions and sending bugreports. So
+first and foremost, we would like to thank all users that sent us
+bugreports, gave suggestions or contributed in any other way to
+LilyPond.
+
+We would also like to thank the following people: Mats Bengtsson for
+the incountable number of questions he answered on the mailing list,
+and Rune Zedeler for his energy in finding and fixing bugs. Nicola
+Bernardini for inviting us to his workshop on music publishing, which
+was truly a masterclass, and Heinz Stolba and James Ingram for
+teaching us there.
+
+Playing and printing music is more than nice analogy: programming
+together is a lot of fun, and helping people is deeply satisfying, but
+ultimately, working on LilyPond is a way to express our deep love for
+music. May it help you create lots of beautiful music!
+
+Han-Wen and Jan
+
+Utrecht/Eindhoven, The Netherlands, July 2002.
+
projects / lilypond.git / blobdiff