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
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
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
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.
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