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I notice a lot of words from the Lilypond authors and users, but don't forget abc (one intro link). If anyone mentioned this, I missed it.

MIDI's a good ol' aging-yet-standard hardware control protocol but abc is a language; ok a primitive language. But it's at a higher level of abstraction than MIDI, and it's both human and machine readable. abc projects seem to be fairly live. there's a large body of musical pieces encoded in abc and online. it can easily be emailed... anyway, worth a look and there are filters to PS score and to MIDI.

abc2ps and abcm2ps are imho way easier to use than anything MusicTeX-based (I have tried both). And they produce darned nice looking score -- I and a colleague did the 2nd movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony, for grins, in full score from the Dover edition.

abc2midi is reliable. midi2abc is, well, it needs a little human help sometimes. but midi to score is a nontrivial problem, as others have pointed out. abc and its tools are very Linux-y really, in what I think of as the good sense: modular, minimalist, very functional.

I used the OSS driver package reluctantly (eee-yew, yuck, it isn't free); I needed just honest MPU 401 support for external modules -- and I was as disappointed as everyone else who ever used a good sequencer on an old, feeble Mac. Those pathetic 68K based products did realtime MIDI miles better than anything I tried under Linux.

IMHO we have a wealth of tools for MIDI-as-data -- i.e. tclmidi, abc2midi, playmidi and a lot more, and a goodly selection of tools for exotic sound cards; but we're still fumbling around for basic bread-n-butter MIDI sound module control and RT sequencing/playback. I could do this with a Mac II si 10 years ago so it's kind of embarrassing... I wish I were a driver maven instead of a lowly app/database hacker. I'm placing my bet on ALSA, but feels like they are at least another year away from being as "real" as, say Linux scanner support or the digital camera stuff.