Re: Cross-staff chords

[Trevor Baca]

On 8/26/05, Erik Sandberg <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> While exploring MusicXML, I found an example of cross-staff chords, see page 
> 19
> of:
> http://www.recordare.com/xml/musicxml-tutorial.pdf
> 
> Have I missed something, or is this impossible to do in lily? Are there plans 
> to
> add it?
> 
> Erik

Hi Erik,

You can use stem length within a PianoStaff in Lily and it works great
even though the stem length setting is a manual fiddle.

I don't think you can do the same thing outside of a PianoStaff (but I
haven't checked yet).

You can see very elegant examples in some of Takemitsu's later scores
where he'll beam together the string section when they play in unison.
And then, of course, there's Xenakis ... who had no problem beaming
together 20 staves at a time.

(If you'd like examples from those or other scores for the thesis, let
me know and I'll scan them and send them to you privately since you'd
need near full-page scans to get the effect.)


Trevor Bača
address@hidden