mpdolce - LilyPond

Chapter 3: Fundamental concepts 48
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The stem directions are automatically assigned with the odd-numbered voices taking upward
stems and the even-numbered voices downward ones. The stems for voices 1 and 2 are right,
but the stems in voice 3 should go down in this particular piece of music. We can correct this
simply by missing out voice three and placing the music in voice four:
\new Staff \relative c'' {
\key aes \major
> |
1 |
}
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We see that this fixes the stem direction, but exposes a problem sometimes encountered with
multiple voices – the stems of the notes in one voice can collide with the note heads in other
voices. In laying out the notes, LilyPond allows the notes or chords from two voices to occupy
the same vertical note column provided the stems are in opposite directions, but the notes from
the third and fourth voices are displaced, if necessary, to avoid the note heads colliding. This
usually works well, but in this example the notes of the lowest voice are clearly not well placed
by default. LilyPond provides several ways to adjust the horizontal placing of notes. We are not
quite ready yet to see how to correct this, so we shall leave this problem until a later section —
see the force-hshift property in Section 4.5.2 [Fixing overlapping notation], page 111.
See also
Notation Reference: Section “Multiple voices” in Notation Reference.
3.2.2 Explicitly instantiating voices
Voice contexts can also be created manually inside a > block to create polyphonic music,
using \voiceOne ... \voiceFour to indicate the required directions of stems, slurs, etc. In
longer scores this method is clearer, as it permits the voices to be separated and to be given
more descriptive names.
Specifically, the construct > which we used in the previous section:
\new Staff {
\relative c' {
>
}
}
is equivalent to
\new Staff