* a free music typesetting software program called LilyPond, available at www.lilypond.org/web
* a manuscript score of a string quartet written over a few decades in the late 1800s by an Italian composer named Salvatore Pappalardo. (I hadn't heard of him either. A scan of the manuscript is at http://imslp.org/wiki/String_Quartet_in_C_minor,_Op.45_(Pappalardo,_Salvatore) . The link from there to internetculturale.it , the Italian site where I got the material, no longer works, but they do have a new URL one can find... that should be fixed and will be soon I think.
The recipe is to go over the difficult-to-read manuscript score, to learn more about LilyPond (no one's idea of an easy-to-use program, but worth it), and from these make a score and parts that look clean, typeset, and represent as faithfully as I can the composer's original intentions. (In some cases "as I can" may be a trouble spot, for a few reasons. I could go into them.
They include a native Italian composer's fluency - most composers when writing music stick to Allegro, Adagio, forte, ... a medium-length but still limited list of mostly Italian terms, usually, for expressive indications and the like. This composer knew his native language of course- and so instead of just "marcato" (marked or markedly, a standard musical adjective) several times in the first of the four movements of this score a phrase has attached to it the words "marcato e dispetto" ("marked and scornfully"). In other places, "smanioso" (eager). In a difficult to read copy of a copy of a handwritten manuscript... well, still fun anyway, the quartet seems worth doing. (Terrific site, IMSLP, though as an admin there I am biased.)
