LilyPond Beginnershandleiding

Hoofdstuk 3: Fundamentele concepten 52
\relative c' { noteA ... }
... }
\\
\relative g' { noteD ... }
>>
\relative c' { noteE ... }
Let us finally analyze the voices in a more complex piece of music. Here are the notes from
the first two bars of the second of Chopin’s Deux Nocturnes, Op 32. This example will be used at
later stages in this and the next chapter to illustrate several techniques for producing notation,
so please ignore for now anything in the underlying code which looks mysterious and concentrate
just on the music and the voices – the complications will all be explained in later sections.
The direction of the stems is often used to indicate the continuity of two simultaneous melodic
lines. Here the stems of the highest notes are all pointing up and the stems of the lower notes
are all pointing down. This is the first indication that more than one voice is required.
But the real need for multiple voices arises when notes which start at the same time have
different durations. Look at the notes which start at beat three in the first bar. The A-flat is
a dotted quarter note, the F is a quarter note and the D-flat is a half note. These cannot be
written as a chord as all the notes in a chord must have the same duration. Neither can they be
written as sequential notes, as they must start at the same time. This section of the bar requires
three voices, and the normal practice would be to write the whole bar as three voices, as shown
below, where we have used different note heads and colors for the three voices. Again, the code
behind this example will be explained later, so ignore anything you do not understand.
Let us try to encode this music from scratch. As we shall see, this encounters some difficulties.
We begin as we have learnt, using the > construct to enter the music of the first bar in
three voices:
\new Staff \relative c'' {
\key aes \major