Our Goal

LilyPond came about when two musicians wanted to go beyond the soulless look of computer-printed sheet music. Musicians prefer reading beautiful music, so why couldn’t programmers write software to produce elegant printed parts?

The result is a program that creates beautiful sheet music following the best traditions of classical music engraving. It takes care of the details of layout programmatically, allowing composers, transcribers and publishers to focus on the music instead of improving their software’s default output. Performers will get parts that let them concentrate on playing music instead of reading it.