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Single staff polyphony

When different melodic lines are combined on a single staff, these are printed as polyphonic voices: each voice has its own stems, slurs and beams, and the top voice has the stems up, while the bottom voice has them down.

Entering such parts is done by entering each voice as a sequence (with { .. }), and combining those simultaneously, separating the voices with \\:

       << { a4 g2 f4~ f4 } \\
         { r4 g4 f2 f4 } >>
     

[picture of music]

For polyphonic music typesetting, spacer rests can also be convenient: these are rests that do not print. It is useful for filling up voices that temporarily do not play:

       << { a4 g2 f4~ f4 } \\
         { s4 g4 f2 f4 } >>
     

[picture of music]

Again, these expressions can be nested arbitrarily:

[picture of music]

More features of polyphonic typesetting are in the notation manual in Polyphony.


This page is for LilyPond-2.0.1 (stable-branch).

Report errors to <bug-lilypond@gnu.org>.