Choral staff for complex vocal music

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

address@hidden writes:
> The amount of staves in choral music can vary even during the same piece - 
> if a section were in unison across all vocal parts only one stave might be 
> printed, if the music is fairly homophonous (almost identical rhythms 
> across all parts, little/no part crossing) two staves might be used, 
> complicated 8 part music might be displayed in 8 separate staves. The 
> assignment of voices to staves can change virtually every system.
> 
> (for an example, see 'In dulci jubilo' arranged by R.L. Pearsal in '100 
> Carols for Choirs', published by Oxford University Press)
> 
> What I would like to do is to input music in a similar way to the satb.ly 
> example file - so each distinct vocal part (Soprano 1, Bass 2 etc.) has a 
> voice and lyrics context defined. These contexts would feed into the 
> ChoralStaff (sic) context which would decide when to combine voices into 
> the same stave/voice and when to separated them out. The user could maybe 
> specify what arrangements they are prepared to accept.
> 
> I am quite happy to try to implement it myself but could do with a bit of 
> help to tell me the best way of going about it, which files to extend etc.
> 

Hi,

My guess is that it would be the easiest to typeset the music in all
configurations possible (ie. as a single stave, double staves,
quadruple in the same score), and after line breaking, kill in each
system the ones which are not appropriate, at first this decision
could be given in manually.

You should look into the mechanism behind RemoveEmptyStaffContext, and
see if you can understand that.  There's a description of the
internals, which you can find on the archives or by requesting it on
this list.

Good luck.


-- 

 Han-Wen Nienhuys   |   address@hidden   |   http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen