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Re: Two spacing bugs: tuplets, staves...plus: ottava/8va parentheses on


From: Marcus Macauley
Subject: Re: Two spacing bugs: tuplets, staves...plus: ottava/8va parentheses on continuation?
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 15:57:53 -0800
User-agent: Opera M2/8.52 (Win32, build 7721)

On Mon, 13 Mar 2006 06:23:22 -0800, Erik Sandberg
<address@hidden> wrote:

On Monday 13 March 2006 09.40, Marcus Macauley wrote:
2. The staves are spaced unevenly.

This is intentional.

All staves, except those inside PianoStaff contexts, are spaced individually. The space between two PianoStaff staves is always the same; this has to do
with the \change command.

I see. I probably want to reduce the space between the two PianoStaff
staves, then. It seems to me the default distance (minimum distance, I
assume) is a bit large, if not for solo piano music then at least for
music where the piano is only one member of the ensemble. Its contrast
with the small minimum distance between other staves is striking.


3. that the ottava (8va) bracket, when it continues on the second line,
should really be parenthesized.

Do you mean the text should be "(8va)" instead of "8va"?

Yes, that's what I meant.

I'm not familiar with that parenthesized notation; do you have any scans of well-engraved scores which do it?

I'm glad you asked! I guess I've become accustomed to it, using Sibelius
and Music Press (I believe Finale does it, too; not sure about SCORE).
Upon searching through the engraved scores I own, every example I've found
repeats the ottava mark at the beginning of the next line, with NO
parentheses.

However, every one of those examples also uses only the numeral "8", not
"8va", whereas Sibelius, Music Press, and Finale by default use "8va".

So I suspect that virtually all the ottava continuations I've seen,
traditionally-engraved or made on computer, have taken one of the
following two forms:

           8va- - - -
(8va)- - - -,

or

           8- - - -
8- - - -,

And, therefore, when Lilypond did...

           8va- - - -
8va- - - -,

...it seemed wrong to me.

I should also note that in all of the examples I found, the dotted or
dashed line extending from the 8 was aligned somewhat higher on the 8 than
it is in Lilypond (or, I believe, in most computer notation programs). For
ottava bassa, of course, it is aligned lower on the 8. This alignment, I
think, serves the purpose that the "va" or "ba" (or occasionally "ab")
does when 8va or 8vb/8ba is used -- it indicates at a glance whether the
ottava modifies the part below (transposing it up an octave) or the part
above (transposing it down an octave).

I would recommend making this elegant (and, in computer music notation,
unfortunately rare) solution an option in Lilypond. Its appearance in
traditional, well-engraved music is very common, and I think its utility
is clear.


The best way to file bug reports, is to send one message for each bug, where a
minimal example, which demonstrates the problem, is presented. "Minimal"
usually means <= 2 bars; I checked (3) above using the following example:

{
  #(set-octavation 1) % begin 8va bracket
  c1 \break c1
  #(set-octavation 0) % end 8va bracket
}


Thanks. I'll do it that way in the future.

Marcus




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