Re: Dynamic voices in polyphonic music - how?

[Jonathan Kulp]

Florian Hollerweger wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> My name's Florian, I am a Lilypond newbie, and currently one of my 
> strategies to get beyond that stage is to use Lilypond to redo a small 
> piano piece I wrote a while ago in Sibelius (a pdf is available at 
> http://flo.mur.at/muteandcontinue-piano.pdf)
>
> The main question this brings up for me is how to deal with polyphonic 
> piano music *in which the number of voices is dynamic*. In other words, 
> the classic fugue situation (the piece is actually a variation on Bach's 
> b-minor fugue from WTC, book one), where voices are fluid and can appear 
> or disappear at different stages during the piece.
>
> A nice option with regards to input-convenience seems to be "Writing 
> Music in Parallel":
> http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.12/Documentation/user/lilypond/Multiple-voices#Writing-music-in-parallel 
>
> However, I am not sure whether that approach is compatible with the 
> flexibility in terms of voice management which I require, i.e. can I 
> change the number of voices during the piece?
>
> I would be helpful for any suggestions as to which of Lilypond's 
> polyphonic strategies lends itself best to this particular situation.
>
> Thanks for your help, and what a great piece of software this is!
>
> best,
> flo.H

Welcome to Lilypond. :)  I always put each voice in a separate variable 
in situations like this, rather than use constructs like <<{ } \\ { }>>. 
 Sometimes a voice will have many bars of "skips," (e.g. s1*24 makes 24 
bars of skips in 4/4 time) but this is fine. To control the stem  and 
slur direction I use \voiceOne, \voiceTwo, \oneVoice, and such commands 
as much as possible.  The downside, I suppose, is that code for each 
voice is separated by some distance in your source file, but as long as 
you comment the file with bar numbers adequately this is not too much 
trouble.  You set up the \score block to include all the voices for the 
whole piece, but the voices come and go as you wish according to whether 
the voices' variables have notes, rests or skips at a given moment.  If 
you'd like to see an example I'll send you a file off-list.

Best,

Jon

--
Jonathan Kulp
http://www.jonathankulp.com