Re: Proportional notation not working as expected.

[Andrew Bernard]

Hi Stefano,

I work extensively with a New Complexity School composer whose work I 
engrave. I disagree with one of his major concepts, which is that the 
bars should be 3.0 cm wide and represent one second of music. He's 
really insistent on this. Personally I don't believe this helps the 
musicians at all, and music is not graph paper as far as I am concerned, 
speaking as a player.

I have tried for years to make equal, fixed width bars with proportional 
notation in Lilypond. With his music changing time signature sometimes 
every bar, I am utterly unable to achieve what he wants. The requirement 
is simple - fixed width bars of a specified size.

I have a vague idea that this concept goes completely against the design 
of the lilypond layout engine, and so it may be stupid to even want 
this. But much as I disagree with the musical justification for this, 
this topic does keep coming up on this list from time to time from 
others also.

Can somebody with deeper knowledge say if this is a forlorn hope? The 
beauty of Lilypond is its magnificent layout engine, but perhaps the 
designers never imagined composers would want fixed width bars, and so 
it can't be done. I don't know.


Andrew


On 15/09/2019 9:18 am, Stefano Antonelli wrote:
> What I want is to define the way a given measure of music looks
> throughout the piece.  In other words, I would like the width of the
> bar should be identical regardless of whatever else is going on in the
> line in which it appears.
>
> Is that possible in lilypond?
>
> At present I have to tweak each line, and even then I can't make the
> bar width the same every time.