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An orchestral score

Our next two examples demonstrate one way to create an orchestral score in LilyPond. When typesetting a piece for several instruments, you'll want to create a full score (for the conductor) along with several individual parts (for the players).

LilyPond is well suited for this task. We will declare the music for each instrument individually, giving the music of each instrument its own name. These pieces of music are then combined in different \score blocks to produce different combinations of instruments (for example, one \score block may only include the cello part; another \score block may be for all the strings, and yet another \score block may be for all parts together).

This orchestral score example consists of three input files. In the first file, os-music.ly, we define the music for all instruments. This file will be used for producing the score and the separate parts, but the file doesn't produce any sheet music itself. Other files reference this file by doing \include "os-music.ly".

     % os-music.ly
     \header {
       title = "Zo, goed lieverd?"
       subtitle = "How's, this babe?"
       composer = "JCN"
       opus = "1"
       piece = "Laid back"
     }
     global = {
       \time 2/4
       \skip 2*4 \bar "|."
     }
     Key = \notes \key as \major
     flautoI = \notes\relative c'' {
       f8 g f g f g f g
       bes as bes as bes as bes as
     }
     flautoII = \notes\relative c'' {
       as8 bes as bes R1 d4 ~ d
     }
     tromboI = \notes\relative c'' {
       c4. c8 c8 c4. es4 r as, r
     }
     tromboII = \notes\relative c'' {
       as4. as8 as8 as4. R1*1/2 as4 es'
     }
     timpani = \notes\relative c, {
       \times 2/3 { f4 f f }
       \times 4/5 { as8 as as as as }
       R1
     }
     corno = \notes\relative c' {
        bes4 d f, bes d f, bes d
     }
     

We will not examine this example line by line, since you already know most of it. We'll examine a few lines which contain new elements.



     global = {
       \time 2/4
       \skip 2*4 \bar "|."
     }
     

Declare setting to be used globally. The \skip command produces no output, but moves forward in time: in this case, the duration of a half note (2), and that four times (*4). This brings us to the end of the piece, and we can set the end bar. You can use s as a shortcut for \skip (the last line of this section would be s2*4 \bar"|.").



     Key = \notes \key as \major
     
Declare the key signature of the piece and assign it to the identifier Key. Later on we'll use \Key for all staves except those for transposing instruments.
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Copyright (c) 1997--2002 Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.


This page was built from LilyPond-1.7.14 (development-branch) by

Buchan Milne <(address unknown)>, Thu Mar 6 21:11:35 2003 CET.