Re: lilypond-user Digest, Vol 146, Issue 81

[David Sumbler]

> From: Noeck <address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: Understanding Lilypond
> Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 00:04:34 +0100
> 
> Dear David,
> 
> as a small addition and a partly similar answer to Urs’, I think the point is:
> LilyPond tries to suggest (or even enforce as a default) conventions of 
> classic
> music notation. This comprises for example that clefs are repeated for each 
> line
> but the time signature isn’t.
> 
> In your case, that means: The key signature can depend on the instrument and 
> can
> be different for each staff. But in most cases, the time signature is the same
> within a score (across staves). You can have polyrhythmical music in LilyPond
> but it is not the default. So while this looks inconsistent from the purely
> programmatical point of view, it makes sense for most music.
> 
> Cheers,
> Joram

With respect, as a professional (mainly classical) musician for half a
century I totally understand why key signatures and time signatures are
handled differently.

My query - evidently not very well expressed - was not "why does
Lilypond handle them differently", but "how does one discover the
internal mechanism by which it does this".  Peter clearly understood
this, and although he could not provide an answer to how to find an
answer in the documentation, he has apparently felt the same frustration
in the past.

If or when I ever get to a comprehensive understanding of how Lilypond
handles things, I might well take Urs up on his suggestion of writing
something on the subject for Scores of Beauty - a site I was not aware
of until this evening.

David