I've been checking out Lily's new autobeaming (1.1.26). An excellent
idea, to provide for a specified bar length for each time, in
particular so that 2-pulse/bar and 4-pulse/bar 4/4 can be shown
properly. And, as promised, a manually-inserted beam overrides the
automatic mechanism cleanly.
But, Scarlatti has a way of making monkeys of us all! He has quite a
few passages of alternating 1/8 or 1/16th notes, 2-3 octaves apart,
played with one hand while the other hand plays legato. These
passages are noted with beaming on the legato voice, but none on the
wildly jumping one. This is, of course, the way the notes are
actually played, not to mention that the score would be totally
illegible with beaming where the jumping hand crossed the other.
Any thoughts on how to tell autobeaming to leave a section unbeamed,
other than by turning beaming off and manually doing the whole piece?
I tried putting [] around single notes, but a 'beam with less than
two notes' has always crashed Lily during Tex output and it still
does.
Just in passing - it is common to beam triple 8ths in 3's and duple
8ths in 4's in the baroque period when they are mixed up together, to
indicate that the duple 8ths are structurally stases, more legato
than the triple phrases. Triple phrases are not only integral to
early music, but are more common than duple outside of marches - I
still think you would be better off using 8t, 16t etc. as durations
in their own right, rather than providing only the \times construct
for them. Then, they could have their own autobeam specification in a
natural way.
John
