Re: Nostalgia

[Mats Bengtsson]

> 
> 
> On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, Rune Zedeler wrote:
> 
> > Citat David Raleigh Arnold <address@hidden>:
> >
> > > The persistence of accidentals should be a voice context and not a staff
> > > context issue.  For whatever reason, this did not come through clearly
> > > from the big discussion of the subject.  It is a good idea to consider
> > > any music with more than one part on a staff to be a reduction.
> >
> > It's not that simple. Stone has more on this.
> >
> > You don't REALLY mean, that the f in
> >
> > < \key c \major
> >   \context Voice=va { fis a }
> >   \context Voice=vb { d f } >
> >
> > should not get natural sign, do you?
> >
> 
...
> 
> In choir music, it is very bad but common practice to put e.g. the tenor
> and bass voice into a single staff (actually, this is only a benefit for
> the conductor, if he/she, as a pianist, wants to play all of the voices).
> As a tenor singer, the bass voice is basically not more or less relevant
> for me than e.g. the soprano voice.  Therefore, I am not interested in the
> bass's accidentals -- at least not more than in the soprano's accidentals.
> Therefore, while reading my voice, I do not want to simultaneously read
> the bass's accidentals, so that in your above example, I personally would
> prefer not to see a natural sign.

If you don't add the natural sign, I'm sure there will be a 
10 minute discussion some time during the rehearsal period
arguing if the sharp in the bass part applies also to the tenor 
part. If you write out the natural explicitly, you are sure to 
avoid that discussion. When it comes to accidentals, I'm very
pragmatic; if you can avoid some confusion by inserting an extra
accidental, do it.

> I can not remember any example where I would have had to regard the bass's
> accidentals to get my own voice right; but I neither can recall any
> example in choir music such as the one above given by you; maybe I should
> have a more detailed look at this.
> 
> As bottom line, I think we really want to have both possibilities of
> accidentals handling (something like a boolean property for turning on/off
> some kind of barrier that prevents accidentals from floating into
> neighbouring voices of the same staff).

Today, you do it by moving the Accidental_engraver (called 
Local_key_engraver in verson 1.4.x) from the Staff translator
to the Voice translator, i.e. 
\score{
  ...
  \paper{
    \translator{
      \StaffContext
      \remove "Accidental_engraver"
    }
    \translator{
      \VoiceContext
      \consists "Accidental_engraver"
    }
  }
}
This has two disadvantages; 
- it looks fairly cryptical if you are unfamiliar to 
  the inner workings of Lilypond
- you specify the same behaviour for the whole score.
  For single exceptions it's easy to add extra accidentals
  with cis! (forced accidentals) but as far as I know we don't
  have the opposite alternative, preventing accidentals for
  a single note. Of course you could also play with Rune's new
  autoAccidentals property.

  /Mats