Re: Voice split across staves?

[Simon Albrecht]

Hello Joel,

Am 08.09.2015 um 22:47 schrieb Joel C. Salomon:
> I’m trying to re-create John Crook’s original score to Peter Pan (yes,
> it’s in the public domain) for the Mutopia project, and I’m finding that
> my lack of musical education is getting in the way.
>
> I’m trying to set “Pipe with the Ostrich”, as visible at
> <https://books.google.com/books?id=J-wQAAAAYAAJ&pg=PT43>; my current
> effort is at
> <https://github.com/jcsalomon/MutopiaProject/blob/peterpan/ftp/CrookJ/PeterPan/PP06_Pipe_with_the_Ostrich/PP06_Pipe_with_the_Ostrich.ly>.
>
> While critiques of my Lilypond style are also welcome,

LilyPond coding style is still very much a matter of personal 
preference. There are some suggestions in 
<http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/usage/general-suggestions>, 
and some conventions, which partly you seem to know:
– one bar per line
– extra blank lines every n bars
– bar number comments
– { … } and similar should either go on one line or be
{
  …
}
– &c.
One thing can also be said quite definitely: Use \new if a context 
doesn’t exist yet and \context only to reference contexts which already 
exist. (Maybe others will come and contradict decisively… however I 
think this is a quite reasonable convention.)
And there is one inofficial standard: the ‘format’ function of 
python-ly, used in Frescobaldi <http://frescobaldi.org>, which I do 
recommend.
[For Scheme code there is a quite official coding style, which is quite 
(though not completely) well-defined and generally used: 
<http://community.schemewiki.org/?scheme-style>. Although you don’t 
happen to make notable use of Scheme code.]

Considering your particular file, I wouldn’t like the excess (if I may 
say so) use of whitespace. I don’t go any further than
{
  g8 a b a  b c d c
  b16 a g a  b a b c   d8 16 c  b8 16 a
}
normally. I find that more readable. But, as I said: that’s highly 
personal, and unfortunately we’re nowhere near any consensus which would 
allow everybody to read someone else’s code without getting a headache :-/.

>   my specific
> question is how best to show what seems to be a voice split across
> staves.

Well, LilyPond’s rather strict logics (currently?) prevent such a thing 
like splitting a voice across staves. You’ll need separate voices, and 
\crossStaff – of which you are already aware – provides a facility to 
draw a stem across staves under standard circumstances (no force-hshift, 
same \voiceXXX, …).

> The “Cross-staff stems” section in the documentation shows a way to draw
> the chords so they cross the gap, but remain connected. One one hand,
> this is different from the printed source; on the other hand, this might
> be better style. On the gripping hand, I can’t see how to apply the
> sample code to music organized as I’ve been doing it.
>
> Could somebody please point me in the right direction?

See attached. I just adapted all of your code to my personal coding 
style, just as a suggestion so you can see what is possible.

Yours, Simon

peter-pan-crossStaff.ly
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