Re: Workarounds for impressionistic music

[Carl Sorensen]

On 1/15/11 9:39 AM, "Mike Solomon" <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hey all,
> 
> For class the other day, I had to typeset a Debussy example, and I found that
> Lilypond does not like some of the hairier passages in Debussy.  To wit:

> 
> You'll see several questionable things in Lilypond's standard output,
> including:
> 
> 1. Beam / staff collisions.
> 2. 64th note beams that seem too thick for the music they contain.

Lilypond warns you that it can't avoid these two problems. There's not
enough space between the systems, and cross-staff beams don't adjust the
staff-staff spacing.  LilyPond doesn't like the beam layout it can come up
with, and it tells you so.

Overriding the staff-staff-spacing of the VerticalAxisGroup  to

\new Staff = "up" \with {
  \override VerticalAxisGroup #'staff-staff-spacing =
    #'((basic-distance . 15)
       (minimum-distance . 5)
       (padding . 1)
       (stretchability . 10))
  } { \key aes \major \clef bass s2. s2 r4 }

will eliminate the warnings, and eliminate the beam-staff collisions.
Setting basic-distance to 13 or 14 will also eliminate the collisions, but
two of the warnings continue.

> 3. Slur / staff collisions.

Increasing the system-system spacing with

\paper {
  system-system-spacing #'basic-distance = #20
  }

fixes the big collision problem in your code.

> 4. Slur / clef collisions.

The staff-staff-spacing override also fixes the slur-clef collision, but the
slur still collides with a leger line.

> 5. Slurs that reach down too far, which causes a large hump @ the top.
> Usually, in this style, the slur tips are far away from the bookend notes in
> the arpeggio, allowing slurs to be flatter at their apogees.

Putting both of the overrides above in place causes 2 of the slurs in the
first line to become horrible.

As far as I know, there are no overrides to fix the bad slur behavior,
although I'm trying to experiment with some of the elements of 'details to
see if I can fix it.

Thanks,

Carl