mpdolce - LilyPond

Chapter 3: Fundamental concepts 52
A note column can contain just one note (or chord) from a voice with stems up and one note
(or chord) from a voice with stems down. If notes from two voices which have their stems in the
same direction are placed at the same position and both voices have no shift or the same shift
specified, the error message “Too many clashing note columns” will be produced.
See also
Notation Reference: Section “Multiple voices” in Notation Reference.
3.2.3 Voices and vocals
Vocal music presents a special difficulty: we need to combine two expressions – notes and lyrics.
You have already seen the \addlyrics{} command, which handles simple scores well. However,
this technique is quite limited. For more complex music, you must introduce the lyrics in a
Lyrics context using \new Lyrics and explicitly link the lyrics to the notes with \lyricsto{},
using the name assigned to the Voice.
>
�
�
4 � � 2 �
� �� � �
�
No more let sins and sor rows
�
�
�
grow.
Note that the lyrics must be linked to a Voice context, not a Staff context. This is a case
where it is necessary to create Staff and Voice contexts explicitly.
The automatic beaming which LilyPond uses by default works well for instrumental music,
but not so well for music with lyrics, where beaming is either not required at all or is used to
indicate melismata in the lyrics. In the example above we use the command \autoBeamOff to
turn off the automatic beaming.
Let us reuse the earlier example from Judas Maccabæus to illustrate this more flexible technique.
We first recast it to use variables so the music and lyrics can be separated from the staff
structure. We also introduce a ChoirStaff bracket. The lyrics themselves must be introduced
with \lyricmode to ensure they are interpreted as lyrics rather than music.
global = { \time 6/8 \partial 8 \key f \major}
SopOneMusic = \relative c'' {
c8 | c([ bes)] a a([ g)] f | f'4. b, | c4.~ c4 }
SopTwoMusic = \relative c' {
r8 | r4. r4 c8 | a'([ g)] f f([ e)] d | e([ d)] c bes' }
SopOneLyrics = \lyricmode {
Let | flee -- cy flocks the | hills a -- dorn, __ }
SopTwoLyrics = \lyricmode {
Let | flee -- cy flocks the | hills a -- dorn, }