GNU LilyPond

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Node:An orchestral score, Next:Other ways to run LilyPond, Previous:A piano excerpt, Up:Tutorial

An orchestral score

• The full score:
• Extracting an individual part:

Our last two examples show a way to setup the music for an orchestral score. When typesetting a piece for several instruments, you'll want to create a conductor's full score, alongside several individual parts.

LilyPond is well suited for this task. We will declare the music for each instrument individually, giving the music of each instrument its own name. These pieces of music are then combined in different \score blocks to produce different combinations of the score.

This orchestral score example consists of three input files. In the first file, os-music.ly, we define the music for all instruments. This file will be used both for producing the score and the separate parts.

If you were to run LilyPond on this file, no printable output would be produced.

% os-music.ly
\header {
  title = "Zo, goed lieverd?"
  subtitle = "How's, this babe?"
  composer = "JCN"
  opus = "1"
  piece = "Laid back"
}
global = {
  \time 2/4
  \skip 2*4 \bar "|."
}
Key = \notes \key as \major
flautoI = \notes\relative c'' {
  f8 g f g f g f g
  bes as bes as bes as bes as
}
flautoII = \notes\relative c'' {
  as8 bes as bes R1 d4 ~ d
}
tromboI = \notes\relative c'' {
  c4. c8 c8 c4. es4 r as, r
}
tromboII = \notes\relative c'' {
  as4. as8 as8 as4. R1*1/2 as4 es'
}
timpani = \notes\relative c, {
  \times 2/3 { f4 f f }
  \times 4/5 { as8 as as as as }
  R1
}
corno = \notes\relative c' {
   bes4 d f, bes d f, bes d
}

We will not go through the input line by line, but only indicate and explain the new elements.

global = {
  \time 2/4
  \skip 2*4 \bar "|.";
}

Declare setting to be used globally. The \skip command produces no output, but moves forward in time: in this case, the duration of a half note (2), and that four times (*4). This brings us to the end of the piece, and we can set the end bar.

Key = \notes \key as \major

Please send GNU LilyPond questions and comments to lilypond-user@gnu.org.

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Copyright (c) 1997--2001 Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.

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