Enharmonic cue notes in choral music.

[David Toms]

Hello,

I have been publishing mainly vocal music for over 10 years with
Sibelius.  This year I have ditched it for Lilypond, and I am pleased
to say that my first effort using it, a book of vocal music with piano,
is at the printers.  The composer says it is the "most elegant
engraving he has ever seen", so well done to everybody!

I'm well into my second book now, which is SATB choral music
unaccompanied, and I have just come across the first problem that I
haven't been able to solve by recourse to documentation and snippets,
so I have just joined the mailing list in the hope that someone can
point me in the right direction.

The music makes frequent harmonic changes, and in a lot of places the
composer helps the singers by 'reminding' them with a cue that, for
example, the A sharp they have just sung is the same note as B flat.
This helps singers over difficult modulations.  I have looked at a lot
of printed vocal music and this occurs quite often - I'm reluctant to
say I could do it fairly easily with Sibelius!

The requirement is to produce a small notehead at the enharmonic pitch,
immediately after the  preceding note, with both the accidental and the
notehead in parentheses. The notehead is really "text",  and should not
affect midi playback, attract lyrics, etc.  I tried using markups but
it is nearly impossible to get the notes in the right place on the
staff. After much searching, and trial and error, I got a "nearly right"
solution, but as the attached snipped shows, the problem with using
"aftergrace" is that the "parenthesised" note can be a long way from
it's parent.

I suspect that this is something I am missing, probably because I don't
know exactly how to describe the problem so I don't really know where to
look in the documentation.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

David

enharmonic3.pdf
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enharmonic3.ly
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