Re: Vocal scores with extra staves

[David Wright]

On Tue 28 Feb 2017 at 10:18:33 (+1100), Andrew Bromage wrote:
> On 27/2/17 10:27 pm, Klaus Blum wrote:
> >It will be easier to align the lyrics to a voice that exists from the very
> >beginning. In your example, I've put the unison part into the same voice as
> >the soprano part.

> That will work for this case, thanks. I'm not sure how well this would scale
> to, say, a Gilbert and Sullivan act finale.

Well I'm looking at the finale of Pinafore¹ (I picked p99/108 at random
and hit the spot!) and I don't see staves starting and stopping mid-page.
But if you want that, I think I'd try using stop/start staff.

> I'm curious what is actually happening. Is the behaviour that I was seeing
> a bug, or is it technically correct but counter-intuitive?

I'm dubious about your construction here:

  \new Lyrics = A
  \context Lyrics = A { \lyricsto B { \lyrB } \lyricsto C { \lyrC } }

I can't find anything documented that looks like that. But someone
familiar with LP code would have to tell you why a syllable gets
"swallowed" by this.

> >In such cases, it's better to explicitely start a new staff instead of
> >having LilyPond do that automatically. Now you can control positions with
> >alignAboveContext or alignBelowContext.
> Thanks for this and also to the kind person who told me this off-list.
> >As you can see, this can get pretty complicated.
> Believe me, it's not as complicated as the non-cut-down example.
> >  With your "real" verses
> >being longer than just two bars, maybe it's easier to start all staves from
> >the beginning and just working with \RemoveEmptyStaves.
> I considered this option. The trouble is, if the place where the unison ends
> and the divisi begins turns out not to be the best place to break a
> line, this
> would be incorrect, because it would appear as if the male chorus should
> not sing during the unison part. Spaces rather than rests would be even
> more confusing.

Then you either have compromises to make or work to do.

Compromises: In a large work, there's usually enough stretch to get
your linebreaks where you want them. Is this for publication, or a
performance score where you can break more rules?

Work: After inserting \RemoveEmptyStaves, you may get part-lines
containing rests in, for example, T/B staves. So you can now
freeze the pagebreaks and add the notes back in where they're
missing, so that the unison breaks out into parts at the start of
a line, and vice versa, eg pp101-102.

¹IMSLP17191-Sullivan-HMSPinaforeVS.mtz.pdf

Cheers,
David.