Re: Unusual cross-staff stem in Bartók
The short answer is that that isn’t the way Bartók chose to do them, even if I would personally do them that way and if a goal is to represent the composer’s intent, then that’s changing things. As others in the thread indicated, it’s more common than I realized, so it presumably serves a function. Arle -- Misit de iPhone meo. > On Jan 20, 2020, at 06:00, Simon Albrecht wrote: > > On 14.01.20 18:15, Arle Lommel wrote: >> Why Bartók didn’t simply show the bottom D in the treble clef is an >> interesting question. I think he was trying to keep the relationship between >> the hands clear, but couldn’t quite include the upper D in a way that made >> sense without splitting it like this. Had he put the lower D in the treble >> clef where it more apparently belongs, it might have led to confusion about >> which hand was to play it. > > To me the question would be why these two chords can’t be all stem-down, i.e. > with the beam within or below the lower staff. That would put the noteheads > on the same side and allow for using common constructs. > > Best, Simon >
Re: Unusual cross-staff stem in Bartók
On 14.01.20 18:15, Arle Lommel wrote: Why Bartók didn’t simply show the bottom D in the treble clef is an interesting question. I think he was trying to keep the relationship between the hands clear, but couldn’t quite include the upper D in a way that made sense without splitting it like this. Had he put the lower D in the treble clef where it more apparently belongs, it might have led to confusion about which hand was to play it. To me the question would be why these two chords can’t be all stem-down, i.e. with the beam within or below the lower staff. That would put the noteheads on the same side and allow for using common constructs. Best, Simon
Re: Unusual cross-staff stem in Bartók
Hi Andrew, > Not at all uncommon. Agreed. > for the case with the notehead on the opposite, you now have lots o good > solutions. Well… I wouldn’t necessarily call my hack a good solution. It would be nice to have some syntactic sugar that would handle these kinds of cases gracefully, allowing the user to (e.g.) dictate notehead direction something like #'(-1 1 1 -1 0), etc. But we do what we can with what we have on hand! Best, Kieren. Kieren MacMillan, composer (he/him/his) ‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info ‣ email: i...@kierenmacmillan.info
Re: Unusual cross-staff stem in Bartók
Hi Arie, Not at all uncommon. In the New Complexity scores that I engrave for a colleague composer we have this continuously, in the piano music. It's actually a fairly standard modernist notation, and true enough indicates the distribution of hands but also that this is a single dyadic chord event, not multiple voices. I didn't answer yet as we tend to have the noteheads on the same side, but for the case with the notehead on the opposite, you now have lots o good solutions. So don;t think this is just Bartok. Andrew
Re: Unusual cross-staff stem in Bartók
> The more things interact unnecessarily, the harder it becomes doing > things reliably. The more we manage to get LilyPond to behave to naive > expectations, the more useable power the average user has at their > convenience. > > So we should not try overexercising the "music is complex, so LilyPond > can be expected to behave in unexpected ways" excuse more than > necessary. I don't have enough of an overview of the problem discussed > here to figure out whether this is the case here. > > -- > David Kastrup David, Thanks for responding this thoughtfully. I may try to create a minimal example of this later. In this case, the steps required weren’t obvious to naive expectations, but I don’t know if they could be made easier. A construct like the following will, I think, always be an unusual one (ignore the bad spacing on the fingering, which I have’t yet fixed). Why Bartók didn’t simply show the bottom D in the treble clef is an interesting question. I think he was trying to keep the relationship between the hands clear, but couldn’t quite include the upper D in a way that made sense without splitting it like this. Had he put the lower D in the treble clef where it more apparently belongs, it might have led to confusion about which hand was to play it. But this is all speculation, and I’m not sure there actually is a naive way to expect this to work because it’s an unusual approach. The two things in this that didn’t make sense naively are: 1. Why I couldn’t use something like " \once \override Stem.length = #8” in a set of beamed notes to adjust the length of the second stem, but this did work: \stemUp \once \override Beam.positions = #'(7 . 8) 8-.[ d!8] I’m sure there is a good reason for this, but that one really doesn’t work the way a naive user would expect. 2. Why a gap appeared in a complex example that didn’t appear in Kieren’s example (which is what necessitated the solution above). This is what I was referring to with the comment about various things interacting. But I suspect that it would be complex to find the source of that small gap, which persisted when I increased the stem length of the non-beamed note to try to make them meet. So I’m not worried here and I think no naive answer would be possible here just because this is weird, and trying to account for an unusual edge case like this probably isn’t worth the effort. Best, -Arle
Re: Unusual cross-staff stem in Bartók
Arle Lommel writes: >> Hope that helps more! >> Kieren. > > > Thanks much. One of the challenging things for folks like me who dip > in and out is keeping track of all the different ways that things can > be done and how all the elements interact. But that is inherent to > this: Music notation is orders of magnitude more complex than printed > text. > > There is a continual learning curve, but I keep coming back to > Lilypond because of all the things I *can’t* reliably do in other > software. It’s great stuff! The more things interact unnecessarily, the harder it becomes doing things reliably. The more we manage to get LilyPond to behave to naive expectations, the more useable power the average user has at their convenience. So we should not try overexercising the "music is complex, so LilyPond can be expected to behave in unexpected ways" excuse more than necessary. I don't have enough of an overview of the problem discussed here to figure out whether this is the case here. -- David Kastrup
Re: Unusual cross-staff stem in Bartók
> Hope that helps more! > Kieren. Thanks much. One of the challenging things for folks like me who dip in and out is keeping track of all the different ways that things can be done and how all the elements interact. But that is inherent to this: Music notation is orders of magnitude more complex than printed text. There is a continual learning curve, but I keep coming back to Lilypond because of all the things I *can’t* reliably do in other software. It’s great stuff! -Arle
Re: Unusual cross-staff stem in Bartók
Hi Arle,
> That did indeed help. It got me 90% of the way there. When I actually applied
> it in the piece I’m setting, I found that the length of the overridden stem
> was pushing the other staff away. It didn’t do this in the example you made,
> so I’m not sure what was interfering
You could always remove it from the spacing engine’s calculations:
\version "2.19.83"
ignoreH =
\propertyTweak horizontal-skylines ##f
\propertyTweak extra-spacing-width #empty-interval
\etc
ignoreV =
\propertyTweak vertical-skylines ##f
\propertyTweak extra-spacing-height #empty-interval
\etc
ignore = \ignoreH \ignoreV \etc
{
\new PianoStaff <<
\new Staff {
bes'8[ ]
}
\new Staff {
\clef bass
\voiceOne
\autoBeamOff
\crossStaff { \once \ignore Stem \tweak NoteColumn.X-offset #-1.175
\tweak Stem.length 7 bes8 s }
\autoBeamOn
}
>>
}
Hope that helps more!
Kieren.
Kieren MacMillan, composer (he/him/his)
‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info
‣ email: i...@kierenmacmillan.info
Re: Unusual cross-staff stem in Bartók
Írta Kieren: > p.s. Maybe this helps? That did indeed help. It got me 90% of the way there. When I actually applied it in the piece I’m setting, I found that the length of the overridden stem was pushing the other staff away. It didn’t do this in the example you made, so I’m not sure what was interfering (maybe something with multiple voices going on). But I found that if I tweaked the other beamed notes with something like \once \override Beam.positions = #'(7 . 8), that allowed me to close the small gap by brute-forcing the stems and beam where I wanted them. Thanks very, very much. -Arle
Re: Unusual cross-staff stem in Bartók
Thank you. This seems to do it nicely. I’d not submitted a MWE because I didn’t
have anything I was confident was even the right sort of starting point and was
looking for a pointer where to even start. Fortunately (for me), you filled the
gap very nicely with this. I’ll need to adapt it for the contexts where I need
it, but I see how now.
This would be a useful snippet to add to the repository.
-Arle
> On Jan 13, 2020, at 23:33, Kieren MacMillan
> wrote:
>
> p.s. Maybe this helps?
>
> \version "2.19.83"
>
> \layout {
> \context {
>\PianoStaff
>\consists #Span_stem_engraver
> }
> }
>
> {
> \new PianoStaff <<
>\new Staff {
> bes'8[ ]
>}
>\new Staff {
> \clef bass
> \voiceOne
> \autoBeamOff
> \crossStaff { \tweak NoteColumn.X-offset #-1.175 \tweak Stem.length 10
> bes8 s }
> \autoBeamOn
>}
> >>
> }
Re: Unusual cross-staff stem in Bartók
p.s. Maybe this helps?
\version "2.19.83"
\layout {
\context {
\PianoStaff
\consists #Span_stem_engraver
}
}
{
\new PianoStaff <<
\new Staff {
bes'8[ ]
}
\new Staff {
\clef bass
\voiceOne
\autoBeamOff
\crossStaff { \tweak NoteColumn.X-offset #-1.175 \tweak Stem.length 10
bes8 s }
\autoBeamOn
}
>>
}
> On Jan 13, 2020, at 10:22 PM, Arle Lommel wrote:
>
> An unusual construct in Bartók:
>
>
>
> How would I achieve this effect? All of the crossStaff examples I find have
> the note heads on the same side of the stem and the stem extends above or
> below one of the notes. I’ve tried to get them to work with moderate success,
> but not with this arrangement.
>
> -Arle
Kieren MacMillan, composer (he/him/his)
‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info
‣ email: i...@kierenmacmillan.info
Re: Unusual cross-staff stem in Bartók
Hi Arle, > How would I achieve this effect? All of the crossStaff examples I find have > the note heads on the same side of the stem and the stem extends above or > below one of the notes. I’ve tried to get them to work with moderate success, > but not with this arrangement. Please always post an MWE, so that nobody has to code the example themselves. =) Thanks, Kieren. Kieren MacMillan, composer (he/him/his) ‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info ‣ email: i...@kierenmacmillan.info
