Next: , Previous: Organizing larger pieces, Up: Tutorial



2.20 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 a 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.ly"
     \header {
       instrument = "Horn in F"
     }
     \score {
       \notes \transpose f c' \hornNotes
     }

The line

       \include "horn-music.ly"

substitutes the contents of horn-music.ly at this position in the file, so hornNotes is defined afterwards. The command \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

[image 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 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, this rest takes 3 measures in 2/4 time

     R2*3

When printing the part, multi-rests must be condensed. This is done by setting a run-time variable

     \set Score.skipBars = ##t

This commands sets the property skipBars property in the Score context to true (##t). Prepending the rest and this option to the music above, leads to the following result

[image 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, a score is made with

     \include "bassoon-music.ly"
     \include "horn-music.ly"
     
     \score {
       \simultaneous {
         \new Staff \hornNotes
         \new Staff \bassoonNotes
       }
     }

leading to

[image of music]

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

Setting run-time variables (“properties”) is discussed in ref-TODO.

Read comments on this page, or add one.

This page is for LilyPond-2.2.6 (stable-branch).

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