Re: New User: How can one separate voice share different clefs in a piano fugue?

[Lukas-Fabian Moser]

Hi Roland,

welcome!

I started to encode the Bach's Fugue Nr. IX in Lilypond. I stumbled over a problem which I could not yet (as a beginner) solve. The music is polyphonic with three distinct voices. There is a bass voice, a soprano voice and an alt voice. The alt voice uses both clefs in the piano notation: Tremble (G) and bass (F).

For everybody's convenience, I attached a sample picture (from the Alte Gesamtausgabe). I _think_ that where you write "clef" (Schlüssel) you actually mean "staff" (Zeile or System - note there's a discrepancy in German/English usage of the word "system").

1. Do I have enter two voices for the tremble clef and two voices to the bass clef since this alt voice is representedi n both clefs? I would prefer to not having to do this to make the alt separate. It just shares both clefs.

No, in a piece like this (that has exactly three voices and stays like this - much easier to deal with than the multi-voice mess one often encounters in 19th century music!), it's almost certainly best to put each voice into one seperate variable:

    \version "2.20"
    
    \language "deutsch"
    
    soprano =
    {
      R1
      r4 r8 h' cis''4
    }
    
    alto =
    \relative {
      r4 r8 e' fis4 r16 h,16 cis d
    }
    
    basso =
    {
      R1*2
      r2 r4 r8 e
      fis4
    }
    
    \new PianoStaff
    <<
      \new Staff
      <<
        \soprano \\
        \alto
      >>
      \new Staff \with { \clef bass } \basso
    >>

2. At three occasions, the alt voice crosses both clefs in the middle and the beam connecting the pitches of this voice must be beween both clefs or also cross the clefs.

      This can be done using \change Staff:
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.20/Documentation/notation/common-notation-for-keyboards#changing-staff-manually

3. Besides coloring the different voices for better readability, I also want to indicate fingering for each vfoice -- which changes for each voice between left and right hand. How can I indicate which hand to use when a fingering number is assigned? Here, this is quite important as it is not always obvious. I want to either use an indication such as RH or LH (right or left hand), or a certain style or color for the fingering.

I never did this in LilyPond, but I'm sure some of the folks here on the list will be able to help out.

Best
Lukas

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