Re: Melisma with manual syllable durations

[David Sumbler]

On Mon, 2017-02-20 at 19:49 +0100, David Kastrup wrote:
> David Sumbler <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > 
> > On Sun, 2017-02-19 at 14:49 +0000, David Sumbler wrote:
> > 
> > Thank you for the responses to my question.
> > 
> > Unfortunately, I now realise that the question was not clearly
> > expressed.  It was not intended to be "is there a way to get
> > melisma in
> > upper and lower voices", but "is there a way to get melisma marks
> > when
> > using manual syllable durations?"
> > 
> > As I said in my original post, I had tried various other ways of
> > setting the second set of words, including the obvious one of
> > creating
> > a \new Voice at the relevant point of the vocal staff and using
> > \lyricsto.  Unfortunately there was a problem with this, which was
> > that
> > the words were set one note late, try as I might to get around the
> > problem.  So instead of spending possibly hours trying to get to
> > the
> > root of this, I decided to try manual durations, which appeared to
> > work
> > perfectly - until I ran into this melisma problem in the second of
> > the
> > relevant songs.  (There is no melisma in the first of the 2 songs.)
> > 
> > In view of the fact that manual durations are the first to be shown
> > in
> > the Notation Reference, it seems surprising if such a standard part
> > of
> > musical notation is not supported.
> > 
> > So - can anyone tell me if melisma markings be produced when using
> > manual durations with lyrics?  And if so, how?
> Again: set associatedVoice accordingly.  Why ask for advice if you
> are
> going to ignore it?

I can understand the evident irritation that my response caused, and I
apologise.  The fact is, though, that I did not ignore the advice
given; but I misconstrued what was being suggested and thought that I
was being asked to use some form of \lyricsto with automatic syllable
placement.  So again, let me apologise.

Having now tried David K's method, I can confirm that it works when
used in my whole score (with sections of the music and the lyrics in
various included files).

I thought it was odd, though, that I needed to name an
"associatedVoice" in order to get the melisma marking to work, when all
the timing information for placing the syllables is already there in
the lyric input.

So I experimented.  I find that, not only does it not matter which
voice or stave I name as "associatedVoice", but it does not even matter
whether such a voice exists!  I can put associatedVoice = "Fred" (and I
assure you I have no items named Fred in the entire piece) and it all
works fine: the notes are correctly placed (as they always were), and
the melisma magically appears (as it used not to do).

In other words, for no apparent reason just adding an associatedVoice
(which need not actually exist) causes the melisma to work.  It has
nothing to do with any slurred or tied notes that are in the associated
Voice.  I tried putting a melisma after a word that was on a minim with
no ties, slurs or extra notes, and sure enough Lilypond prints the
melisma so long as associatedVoice is set to something (anything!)

David S.