Eastern Orthodox Christian Chants

This repository contains the TeX and LilyPond source code for Eastern Orthodox Byzantine, Russian and Georgian chants and liturgical texts. The holy_cross_hermitage folder contains music obtained from the website of Holy Cross Hermitage in Wayne, WV. Several of the shared files in the inc folder are also from that source.

Dependencies

Depending on which parts of this project you want to use, you'll need the following software installed:

• Make
• Lilypond (>= 2.16.2)
• TeX/LaTeX (more specifically, XeLaTeX)
• Python (>= 2.7)

You should also install the fonts under the fonts directory before attempting to compile any documents. Under *nix platforms, these should also be placed in the ~/.fonts folder to be recognized by LilyPond.

If you use the Python scripts (used for generating templates for creating new scores), you'll need to install the following Python packages listed in the requirements.txt file, which has been generated using the Pip utility's freeze command.

Usage

Common tasks have been captured in the Makefile. Use the default make command to determine if you have satisfied the minimum system-level dependencies specified in the Dependencies section.

Compile Musical Scores

Music has been typeset using Lilypond. See the scores directory for a listing of available scores.

To compile a single piece of music, you should run the following:

make score name=only_begotten_son_znammeny

The score rule requires at least a name variable be defined, which represents the base filename of the score to be compiled (e.g., scores/only_begotten_son_znammeny.ly). This will compile the Lilypond file with that name under the scores directory and place the PDF and MIDI output into the pdf and midi folders respectively.

While putting together a new piece of music, it helps to use a PDF viewer that either auto-reloads files when changed, or makes it easy to refresh them after each edit-compile cycle.

Compile Texts

Text have been composed using a form of LaTeX called XeLaTeX. This flavor of LaTeX makes trivial to use system-installed fonts in TeX documents without requiring any font conversions.

Documents are compiled differently based on their needs. Some are simple documents that require a single pass, others may have tables of contents and references that require several compilation passes. If you're not familiar with LaTeX, you should familiarize yourself with it first.