Re: Verses with Different Rhythms

[Mats Bengtsson]

>   A piece I am typesetting had a similar issue I ran into. The notes were 
> equivalent to  << { c4 } \\ { c8 c } >>  or whatever the polyphony notation 
> is; lyrics just skipped the polyphony attempts anyways. Stanza 1 was the 
> hyphenated lyric and stanza 2 had a single word. The typesetting also had all 
> lyrical notes unbeamed.
>   After talking to people and putting thought into it, I planned to change it 
> to something like  c8( c)  as the other seemed wrong and I couldn't figure 
> out how to properly implement it in lilypond; \melisma and \melismaEnd should 
> do it and I cant remember if it didn't work or I couldn't figure out to do 
> that. I also plan to change it to beamed vocal notes.


In principle, you can only connect a line of lyrics to a single
voice or music, otherwise it's impossible for LilyPond to find out
which of the rhythms to follow. What happens when you use the
<< {...} \\ {...} >> is that two new voices (Voice contexts) are
created. The solution is either to let both voices live throughout
the whole piece and connect the lyrics to one of them (you can use
spacing notes or skips, s2.*61 or \skip 1*17, in one of the voices
when there's only one voice playing). If you only have a few notes
with two voices, it's probably easier to do:

single voice music ...
<<{ \voiceOne notes in the same voice as before }
  \new Voice { \voiceTwo notes in a second voice }>> \oneVoice
single voice music

This imitates the \\ construct, but only creates one new Voice context.
The \voiceOne and \voiceTwo macros set the direction of stems, slurs,
and so on, and the \oneVoice reverts these settings.
(The << {...} \\ {...} >> implicitly does the same settings.)

    /Mats