Re: Reducing staff numbers in LilyPond

[David Wright]

On Mon 16 Oct 2017 at 14:38:11 (-0500), Ken Williams wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 12:11 PM, David Wright <address@hidden>
> wrote:
> 
> > It strikes me that notating this unusual effect on one staff
> > increases ambiguity and the potential for mistakes, compared with
> > just duplicating the notes on the normal two staves. When choral
> > basses look at an E on the bottom line of a treble staff, they
> > don't prepare their voices for singing at the top of their range.
> >
> > It could end up as a neat way of making yourself unpopular with
> > Sopranos and Basses alike. Hey, why not go the whole hog and use
> > a C clef!
> >
> 
> I honestly did not expect this kind of response, and I'm getting it from
> multiple people.  I asked a technical question and got a whole bunch of
> "answers" saying I'm stupid to try to achieve that effect.  Except for
> Kieren hinting that it will probably be difficult, there has been *zero*
> actual discussion about the technical aspects of it.

My use of the word "effect" was to describe the sound, not the
score, and that's down to the composer. As I'm sure you know, it's
not uncommon to start or finish a piece on a single note, an
effect in itself; but a sustained passage is rare, hence "unusual".
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it per se.

> If LilyPond or its community isn't friendly to people who want to
> experiment with notation, I guess I'm finding that out pretty quickly.

Sorry you didn't like my parting quip; it wasn't meant to be
unfriendly.

But I'd be interested to know why you'd particularly love this
notation as you didn't say; then one could weigh up the pros
and cons. Singing the music in your graphic, any tenor/bass
would read that as a normal octave transposition. (A conductor
might ask the sopranos and tenors to fake that bottom note rather
than "dig" for it.) You'd need to write "unison without octaves"
if it wasn't already explained in prefatory material.

I hope you won't mind my pointing out one tiny item: it looks as
if the third measure has r1 instead of R1 which is displacing the
rest from a central position.

Cheers,
David.