Re: Choir problems

[Mats Bengtsson]

> Hi!
> 
> Could somebody please point me to some files of choir musik I could learn 
> from? Ideally, there should be a piece for soprano solo and soprano, alto, 
> tenor, and bass - 1 staff for the solo voice, 1 staff for soprano & alto, and 
> 1 staff for tenor & bass, each of these staffs would have their own lyrics.

There are a few score at Mutopia for choir, but I'm not sure if 
they use the addlyrics feature.

> Or, alternatively, could somebody tell me what I'm doing wrong in the ly file 
> attached to this mail.

I did a few changes and now it should work without problems, see
the attachment.

> I started with the soprano solo (voice: SopranSoloStimme, lyrics: 
> SopranSoloText). This was fine - automatic melismata and all such sorts of 
> things.
> 
> Then I added the soprano (voice: SopranStimme, lyrics: FrauenText; in fact, 
> the same lyrics are used for soprano and alto, so there is no need for 
> separate lyrics for soprano and alto).
> 
> First problem: the automatic melismata do not work. Adding " \property 
> Voice.automaticMelismata ÿ#t" to the soprano and alto voices does not help - 
> this leads to the weirdest error messages, one about an unfinished legato in 
> bar 50.
> 
> OK, so I wrote the lyrics with explicit lengths. This worked, so far.

If you read the manual carefully, you'll notice that \addlyrics takes
two sequences of music as arguments, copying the rythm of the first
one to the second one. Thus, when you entered
    \addlyrics
      \context Staff=Frauen \notes \SopranStimme
      \context Staff=Frauen \notes \AltStimme
      \context Lyrics=Frauen \FrauenText
it used the rhythm from SopranStimme on the AltStimme but didn't
do anything to the FrauenText. I changed it such that the lyrics
used the rhythm of the soprano part. You also have to set 
automaticMelismata in every voice that's used as the first argument
of \addlyrics. I actually set it in all voices of the full score
with \property Score.automaticMelismata = ##t.

In the reference manual, section "Lyrics", subsection 
"Automatic syllable durations" you can see how to instantiate
contexts before calling \addlyrics if you for example want the
lyrics on top of the staff. 

Some more comments:

- It's a good practice to insert bar checks (using "|") 
  for every bar. It really helps tracking down typing errors. 

- You had used slurs not only for slurred notes but also for 
  tied-over notes. I changed those to ties ("~"). You had a
  couple of combinations of ties and slurs, which I then 
  specified exactly as such, not as slurs and phrasing slurs.
  I kept one phrasing slur, though, since the corresponding 
  lyrics included several syllables. 

- Specify dynamics using \mf, \f and so on. If you want them 
  above the staff, just say \dynamicUp (see ly/property.ly 
  for more of these convenient shorthands for property settings).
  
- We should really add real support for Latin1 coded lyrics.
  At the moment, you get all the characters in the printed 
  output, but since Lilypond doesn't recognize characters 
  like äöß, it can't calculate the length of each syllable
  when it tries to adjust the note spacing to avoid collisions
  between syllables. 

> Then I began adding the alto voice (AltStimme), and the catastrophe began: 
> Look at bar 50: despite the 3/4 time, there is a half and two quarter notes 
> in it!

Since you copied the rhythm from the soprano and didn't use
automaticMelismata in the soprano part, see above.

    /Mats

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