Daemonic Dispatches

I Vespri Siciliani

... and now for something completely different. Over the past weekend I played two concerts in the first violin section of Vancouver's West Coast Symphony Orchestra: Verdi's Overture to I Vespri Siciliani, an aria from Handel's Messiah, and the Verdi Requiem. All wonderful music; but the first violin score for the Overture was horrid. Not only was it a handwritten Kalmus part from 1965; but it also had wind cues written in. Presumably the purpose was to allow the violin score to be used by a conductor; but the net result was to render it almost entirely illegible.

So I fixed it. Thanks to LilyPond and about six hours of work, I now have a beautifully typeset Violin I score to Verdi's Overture to I Vespri Siciliani, which I am hereby placing in the public domain in the hope that it will be useful to some other violinist at some point (note that since Verdi died in 1901, his works are in the public domain; but individual editions may not be). The LilyPond 2.13.9 source code is also available.

Open Source: It's not just for software!

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