[Aidevah]

LilyPond is incredible for the one purpose it's built for: engraving notated music. But music engraving is the usually the very last step of a compositional or editorial process. As such, other methods, even pen and paper, may well be superior tools for the creative process of composition (although we should also remember the testimony of Bach's sons that the elder Bach always composed away from the keyboard, and regarded the inability to compose without an instrument at hand to be evidence of poverty of invention; of course, this does not rule out the possibility that Bach tested out out his draft compositions on a keyboard).

On the editorial side, LilyPond is an incredible tool for creating modern editions of earlier music, specifically music in mensural notation. It comes with common glyphs and has full ligature support, and the separation of content and presentation means that one can reproduce the look of early manuscripts and prints while generating a modern score from the same source file. This has been really great at reducing transcription errors by easing the mental burden of transcription, transposition and note reduction, which can all be handled automatically by LilyPond. It's not perfect, but miles ahead of any alternative.

[viraptor]

> elder Bach always composed away from the keyboard, and regarded the inability to compose without an instrument at hand to be evidence of poverty of invention

What older people on the extreme of some skill think about the skill is not necessarily applicable to 99.9% of us.

[tomcam]

Bach had zero need to “test out” his music at the keyboard. He could hear it perfectly in his head.