Re: parts sharing a staff

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hi Shevek,

> Well, it is part of the presentation layer, but the specific decision of how
> to combine parts in a particular passage depends on what the music is. If I
> decide one to day to change a unison passage to octaves, then the next to
> make it solo, and after that to make it dovetail contrapuntally, those
> musical content changes all directly affect how the parts should be combined
> on a staff or not. Abstracting the decision to combine or not would mean I
> need to look in two places in the code to understand what's happening there.
> 
> I see it as similar to modifying the shape of a slur. It's purely
> presentational, but it depends directly on the musical content, so I would
> find it rather confusing to put the override in a separate part of the code
> from the notes.

Ah, I understand.

Yes, different ways of working with Lilypond definitely work more or less well 
depending on which hat I'm wearing at a given time (composer, arranger, 
orchestrator, or engraver). That's why I try, if at all possible, to avoid even 
cracking Lilypond open until I'm converging on the final engraving: at that 
point, I can enter all the musical content (notes, dynamics, curves, text, 
etc.) at a single go, and then turn my attention entirely to the presentation 
layer (which lives in a single, but separate, part of the file-set). On the 
rare occasion I need to bounce back and fix something in the content code, 
Frescobaldi's shortcuts make it dead simple to do so.

Anyway, thanks for letting me know about your combining/splitting 
process/mechanism — it will be a useful addition to the document I'm putting 
together.

Cheers,
Kieren.
________________________________

Kieren MacMillan, composer
‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info
‣ email: address@hidden