Jack - I have seen the Cage book. I will not be converting most of them to abc! On beautiful but non-standard scores, I always liked one page from Peter Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs For A Mad King (IIRC) where the score is artfully turned into something like a bird cage. (Interestingly, although many of the composers in Cage's book have written for the classical guitar - Takemitsu in particular wrote a lot of guitar music - they tended to stay nearer standard scores; extreme dynamics, unusual rhythms and note lengths, some randomness, but largely what most people would recognise as a score).

Geoff - there are/were converters to music xml - abc2xml and xml2abc -but but the home page they were on no longer has them. However, you might have a look here though: Sonata - abc2xml, which is part of the Sonata project and uses these converters. This link takes you to directorues for Windows and Linux (download the exe and dll file for Windows: usage: abc2xml abcfile.abc >xmlfile.xml. (If you can't get on with that, I still have all this stuff on my machine; I have a lot of abc software, though abcm2ps is pretty much all I use regularly).

There is another way to get music xml: Use abcm2ps to generate a postscript file and convert that to pdf (using GSView or similar). Then you can get Recordare's pdfToMusicPro, which will convert the pdf to XML. (I used something like this on the Yorkshire Garland tunes - starting with a pdf generated by Sibelius, I converted them to musicXML using this program, and then used a modified version of the xslt file xml2abc.xsl to convert the musicXML to abc). When I got the copy of pdfToMusicPro it was free, but it looks as if you have to pay for it now, though you can download a trial copy.

(I did make a start on an abc2 parser (in Prolog) and in the early stage of testing I did generate musicXML, but I dumped that long ago. I still have the parser and a test printer that converts the parse back to abc. If I go back to it I'll probably add xml as an output).

Mick