I would argue that the granddaddy of them all is the PLAY statement in BASIC:

https://hwiegman.home.xs4all.nl/gw-man/PLAY.html

I had a lot of fun with this on my Commodore. The version of BASIC on the C=128 was surprisingly versatile. I was just a kid in elementary school, but messing with ENVELOPE and PLAY taught me the basics of attack/decay/sustain/release and other synth concepts. Very cool stuff to discover in the giant manual that came with the thing!

Indeed. And if you use Lilypond, check out Frescobaldi -- it makes typesetting and editing scores much easier, via things like syntax-staff co-highlighting.

https://www.frescobaldi.org/

I dunno... what about csound?

https://csound.com/

Which itself is a child of an even grander daddy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSIC-N

You can hear some recordings presumably made with these programs on this release: https://www.discogs.com/Various-Music-From-Mathematics/relea...

Some of it is gimmicky, some still kinda rocks.

Thanks for the tip. I hadn't realized that csound came from a longer lineage of work.

I struggle to get LilyPond running on MacOS - is it easier on Linux? It would be great for us but my mates all use Windows or MacOS, so we resort to graphical notation programs, where version control and portability is hard

It's extremely easy to get it running on Linux. Many distributions have a lilypond package, which just works out of the box.

The problem I've always had with the language is that it's quite arcane and if you want to do anything weird (like, a tie to nowhere) you're either at the mercy of somebody else having solved the problem first, or failing that, a huge learning curve. It's a lot like latex in that way. That said, if you just need to do simple stuff, the language almost magically gets out of your way.

Have you checked out the unofficial Homebrew tap `nwhetsell/lilypond` [1]?

It has a `lilypond` formula that has worked fine for me. Beware though that it installs some kind of TeX repository sized 7 GB.

[1]: https://github.com/nwhetsell/homebrew-lilypond

I've never noticed any difficulty getting LilyPond running on MacOS or Linux? I use it regularly on MacOS, and keep it installed on Linux for special occasions.

How did you install it on MacOS?

Oh. I'm still using MacOS 10.14, so there's an official up-to-date version to download from the Lilypond site, and I think I'm using a two year old version of that. (I am very slow to update the OS on my main work machine, usually just ride out the major version it came with until I update to a new machine; and since I was working on a book in Lilypond, I wasn't in a hurry to update it, either.)

Sorry I can't be of more help immediately!