Node: An orchestral part, Next: Integrating text and music, Previous: Organizing larger pieces, Up: Tutorial
In orchestral music, all notes are printed twice: both in a part for the musicians, and in a full score for the conductor. Identifiers can be used to avoid double work: the music is entered once, and stored in variable. The contents of that variable is then used to generate both the part and the score.
It is convenient to define the notes in a special file, for example,
suppose that the horn-music.ly
contains the following part of a
horn/bassoon duo.
hornNotes = \notes \relative c { \time 2/4 r4 f8 a cis4 f e d }
Then, an individual part is made by putting the following in a file:
\include "horn-music.lyinc" \header { instrument = "Horn in F" } \score { \notes \transpose f c' \hornNotes }The
\include
command substitutes the contents of the file at
this position in the file, so that hornNotes
is defined
afterwards. The code \transpose f c'
indicates that the
argument, being \hornNotes
, should be transposed by a fifth
downwards: sounding f
is denoted by notated c'
, which
corresponds with tuning of a normal French Horn in F. The
transposition can be seen in the following output:
In ensemble pieces, one of the voices often does not play for many measures. This is denoted by a special rest, the multi-measure rest. It is entered with a capital R, and followed by a duration (1 for a whole note, 2 for a half note, etc.) By multiplying the duration, longer rests can be constructed. For example, the next rest takes 3 measures in 2/4 time:
R2*3
When printing the part, the following skipBars
property must be
set to false, to prevent the rest from being expanded in three one bar
rests:
\property Score.skipBars = ##tPrepending the rest and the property setting above, leads to the following result:
The score is made by combining all of the music in a \score
block, assuming that the other voice is in bassoonNotes
, in the
file bassoon-music.ly
:
\include "bassoon-music.lyinc" \include "horn-music.lyinc" \score { \simultaneous { \new Staff \hornNotes \new Staff \bassoonNotes } }
This would lead to the simple score depicted below:
More in-depth information on preparing parts and scores is in the notation manual, in Orchestral music.
This page is for LilyPond-2.0.1 (stable-branch).