Lyrics without visible notes

[Paul Harouff]

Putting a skip in the lyrics prints a note without lyrics under it. But putting a skip in the music does not print the lyrics without a note over it; instead, the words are just shifted to the next note.

 

It is useful to able to use note skips to fix spacing issues around bar lines, but I believe it would be much more intuitive to have the behavior of skips completely reciprocal between music and lyrics. If you want both blank music and lyrics for spacing, it would make more sense to enter a skip in BOTH.

 

There is another way to enter hidden notes, but the directions are in the documentation under "Educational Use", and if you have to do this over and over it gets tedious, especially since you have to enter the pitch:

 

f4 \hideNotes f4 f4 f4 f4 \unHideNotes f4

 

Up to now I have been using a breve to represent repeated pitch for chant music (see snippet below), but I'm finding that sometimes this makes the music too cluttered and confusing for the choir because of spacing issues around the lyrics in quotation marks, especially if ragged-right = ##f. I would rather print the words without anything over them until the pitch changes and use hidden notes to fix the spacing.

 

 

\version "2.11.25"

 

% New Measure

NM = { \cadenzaOff \bar "|" \cadenzaOn }

% New Line Break

NL = { \cadenzaOff \bar ":" \break \cadenzaOn }

\score { \new StaffGroup <<
 \new Staff = women <<
  \clef treble
  \key f \major
  \new Voice = "Soprano" {\voiceOne \cadenzaOn \override Stem #'length = #5
            #(set-accidental-style 'forget)
            f'4 f'\breve f'4 g'4 a'2( g'4 f'4) e'2 \NM \break
            e'4 e'\breve e'4 f'4 g'2 f'4( e'4) f'2 \NM \break
            d'4 d'\breve d'4 e'4 f'2( e'4 d'4) cis'2 \NM \break
            cis'4 cis'\breve cis'4 d'4 e'2( d'4 cis'4) d'2( e'2) \bar "|"
   }
  \new Lyrics \lyricsto "Soprano" { 
            Re- "joice, O chosen by God of all" gen- e- ra- "tions!" |
            Re- "joice, holy ves-" sel of God the "Word!" |
            Re- "joice, fulfillment of pro- phet-" ic fore- tell- "ing!" |
            Re- "joice, most hon- or- a- ble crown of" the dis- ci- "ples!"
   }
  >>
>>
 \layout { \context { \Staff
   \remove "Time_signature_engraver"
   }
   between-system-padding = 0.1\in
   between-system-space = 0.1\in
   indent = #0
   ragged-right = ##t
   ragged-last = ##t
 }
 \header {
  piece = ""
  opus = ""
  }
}

 

Paul