Re: Stanzas over staves

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hi Helge,

Do you have a snippet where something similar has already been
implemented or some hint how I can approach this?

Having done a number of music+text works, I can tell you that the exact manner in which the text and music interact is extremely important in determining how to best engrave it.

Here are three chunks of score from my piece "The Dewey Decimal System" for [female] narrator, clarinet, and marimba.

1. A situation in which the narration is read against continuously playing music, with an indication of [roughly] where the speaker should *begin* speaking, but no explicit rhythmicization of the text:

2. A situation in which the narration is explicitly rhythmicized:

3. A situation in which the music "vamps" under the narration:

There are other combinations and permutations. Your situation may be one of the above, or something completely different.

One approach would be to spread empty measures and to add the text
manually or with some glue and additional paper. This leads to the
question how to stretch an empty measure?

Put a hidden MMR, and then tweak MMR.minimum-length as necessary?

But it would be nice to enter the text in the Lilypond score.

It can definitely be done.

Best,

Kieren.

________________________________

Kieren MacMillan, composer
‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info
‣ email: address@hidden