{\TeX\ and music}
{Federico Garcia}
{For some years I've been working on writing a professional music
typesetting system with \TeX\ (and \MF). In 2005 I even had a grant from
the \TeX\ Development Fund that allowed me to do a first model of the
system. Since then the system has evolved, and particularly between 2010
and now I have actually developed a promising model.

This presentation does a little bit of history of the main idea of the
\TeX{}muse system, which as will be seen is entirely inspired by the
\TeX{} `spirit'. This touches on the potentially disastrous problems of
\acro{WYSIWYM} for music typesetting; on what similarly oriented systems
have done (and not); and on whether even in spite of these problems the
project is worth pursuing. The answer is in the affirmative, mainly
because of the more disastrous problems of the alternative, i.e.\
commercial software. (In a nutshell, those problems are that those
programs are \emph{not} inspired by \TeX's spirit! In concrete, there
are some achievements of \TeX{}muse that would change the life of any
composer.) I also demonstrate some pretty cool programming tricks that I
have found, both in \TeX\ and in \MF, that in my view speak to the
beauty of the systems. The talk does not require technical knowledge of
music or music typesetting.
}