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An orchestral part

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:

[picture of music]

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 = ##t
     
Prepending the rest and the property setting above, leads to the following result:

[picture of music]

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:

[picture of music]

More in-depth information on preparing parts and scores is in the notation manual, in Orchestral music.


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