Re: [Best Practices] splitting and combining choral parts

[Simon Albrecht]

Hello Kieren,

first of all: Looks like a nice piece!
Second: offtopic nitpicks. There are some superfluous LyricExtenders 
there – I’d rather leave them out if they are very short. 
(<http://sourceforge.net/p/testlilyissues/issues/4509/> …) And note the 
mid-air bar-numbers, where they are aligned with ScoreMarks. I’d move 
Bar_number_engraver to the topmost staff. And I like for long syllables 
to be increasingly left-aligned, for which I wrote a custom grob callback.
And finally on your actual point, an answer which is probably not the 
one you wanted to hear: :-)

I’d vote to keep with four staves, at least in this example. My model 
for engraving choral scores is the respective volume in the 1926 
Breitkopf & Härtel Brahms complete edition. It’s beautiful and excellent 
to read. It always uses a consistent number of staves for the music 
(which might also be due to the music), which I think gives more 
consistent looks and takes some difficulty (in finding the staff he 
should be singing from) from the singer. The other major point is that 
it doesn’t print ‘redundant’ lyrics, i.e. passages with equal rhythm and 
wording in multiple voices have the lyrics printed only once, mostly 
below the topmost of the staves. This is certainly a controversial 
feature, but IMO the clarity it adds to the score and the nudge to not 
only read one’s own voice are valuable, alongside with the gain on 
vertical space.
For this I also wrote a nice, easy-to-use solution, which you find 
applied to the version in the attachment.
Of course there are cases where one needs to go e.g. to eight staves, or 
have other changes in staff number – the best of orchestral score 
engravings show it. It _would_ of course be great to have a good 
mechanism for that in LilyPond, but it looks like a really involved task.

Other measures to obtain closer vertical spacing are shifting dynamics 
(a task for which I haven’t yet found a definite, if only personal 
solution yet – very complicated) – and narrower hairpins (My default 
stylesheet has \override Hairpin.height = 0.45).

I hope there is something useful for you amongst these ideas…

Yours, Simon

On 24.11.2015 16:14, Kieren MacMillan wrote:
> Hello list,
>
> I’ve posted this question several times before, but the discussion always got 
> truncated or derailed… I’m hoping this time we can work this through to a 
> solution.
>
> Choral pieces tend to have both sections of polyphony (requiring 4 or more 
> staves) and sections of homophony (requiring as few as 1 staff). I want to be 
> able to arbitrarily break systems and have Lilypond Do The Right Thing™, by 
> which I mean use the maximum number of systems when necessary, but combine 
> voices and lyrics to 3 or 2 staves or even 1 staff where possible.
>
> Bonus points if we can convince Lily to automagically [e.g., via an engraver?] 
> put a user-definable markup indicating who is singing at a given moment, add 
> splitting-or-combining arrows at the end(s) of systems, etc.
>
> I’ve attached the first 17 measures of one of my original carols as an example 
> we can work with/through. Is anyone out there willing to work with me to find 
> the Best Practice here? I’m happy to do this on-list or off-, as appropriate.
>
> Thanks,
> Kieren.
> ________________________________
>
> Kieren MacMillan, composer
> ‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info
> ‣ email: address@hidden
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> lilypond-user mailing list
> address@hidden
> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user

WithersCarol_example.ly
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interpolate.ily
Description: Text document

switch-lyrics.ily
Description: Text document