Re: Vocal slurring and override-auto-beam-setting?

[Alexander Kobel]

James E. Bailey wrote:
>> wrong! I see that when notes are slurred, the slurred notes have
>> beams. Is there an easy way to indicate that if notes are within a
>> slur, they should be beamed, otherwise not?
> 
> Not that I know of.
> 
>> I suspect it can be done with 'override-auto-beam-setting'
> 
> Not really, that deals more with setting automatic beam behaviour based
> on the time signature. You're better off just explicitly putting in
> beams with [ ] .And since they'll almost always occur with slurs, you'll
> probably end up with a lot of ([ )].

I thought about this very problem a week or two ago, too. And ended up
with exactly this solution.
My idea for a scheme hack was to add forbidBeamEvents for every chord
outside of slurs and leave the remaining stuff to the automatic beaming;
however, for some reason, this did not work out well. I didn't really
dig into this deeper, since I don't have the time right now - if anyone
is interested, I can send look for my bits of code and send it to you.

But - depending on your literature (and the epoche) - for most music
I've been setting it's enough to just not slur, but manually beam short
melismata, and disable automatic beaming: beams <-> melismata, no beams
<-> one syllable per chord. That's fairly widely used in vocal music,
and won't disturb the singers. Of course, for longer melismata you
should use slurs, but this usually does not happen too often, especially
for simpler pieces.
Speaking of Bach's or Handels' serious music, it's another thing, of
course...

My advise: spare the time for beaming first, and show a page or two to
some singers - preferrably not the best ones you can find. If they agree
with the results, most probably others will be as well, as long as they
don't pay for your work...


Cheers,
Alexander