Re: Automatic beaming in vocal cadenzas

[David Kastrup]

Colin Campbell <address@hidden> writes:

> After wrestling with a transcription of an unmetered piece by Mark
> Sirett (Thou Shalt Know Him), my wife and I were going bonkers trying
> to get lyrics aligned to the notes. The piece has no time signature
> and bars of uneven length. We tried using \cadenzaOn to get the
> unmetered aspect, but the fundamental problem is that \cadenzaOn turns
> off autoBeam, which in turn means that manual beaming in a cadenza
> creates unwanted melismata. We worked out that taking out the
> \cadenzaOn(Off) would help, and getting rid of a default time
> signature is easy enough, by removing the engraver in the Staff
> context and entering explicit bars ( \bl = \bar "|" ), but we had to
> beam by hand and we still got barlines in unexpected (i.e. we didn't
> enter them!) places. The last pieces of the puzzle were to go to the
> Layout block and a Score context, to set automaticBars = ##f , then
> back to our \global for a time signature of 1/4 so that autoBeam would
> group eighths in twos, Bob's your uncle, and so to bed!

Can you check out issue 3633?  The principal problem I see is that auto
beaming will likely not occur at all, and I don't really see how this
can be avoided in unmetered music.  But unless you switch autoBeam off
explicitly, manual beams should not create melismata.

-- 
David Kastrup