I'm working on transcribing some movements of an oratorio. In common with that genre, the same words (more or less) get repeated over and over again. I'm trying to minimize both typing and errors and have come up with the following which does most of what I want:
\version "2.20.0"
Lord = \markup \concat { "L" \smallCaps "ord" }
noSee = \lyricmode { Yet doth the \Lord see it not; }
mock = \lyricmode { He mock -- eth at us; }
curse = \lyricmode { His curse hath fal -- len down up -- on us; }
sopranoVerse = \lyricmode {
%{p20%} \mock \noSee \mock \mock \curse
}
I still need to type in explicit lyrics for when half-phrases are repeated.
The real shortcoming is that the phrases actually tend to be followed by different punctuation. I've hard coded semicolons in this example, but I'd like to be able to replace them with other things without doing much typing. Making each one a function would be fine: something like \curse ! No problem putting punctuation after each one, but I'm only a beginner with define-music-function and this isn't a music function.
Thanks
Paul McKay