On 2015-01-05 15:03, Alicuota618 wrote:
Hello,
Considering a choir-setting with many stanzas, the text makes this is
a little bit ugly to read, specially for amateur-choirs in stressing
situation (concert...).
How does engravers eventually make these lyrics more readable?
I think of four possibilities:
- repeating the stanza # at each system, but I dont want this solution...
- make some stanzas in italic
- change some stanzas for sans-serif
- draw a line-separator every 3-4 stanzas (but how to do that with ly?)
Did somebody found any hymn-setting with this kind of typesetting?
Hi,
I've never seen option 3 (sans-serif), but all the others. The one I
like most is 4, using a little bit of whitespace (instead of a
rule-/line-separator) after three stanzas. This can easily be achieved
by overriding nonstaff-nonstaff-spacing.minimum-distance for the last
stanza of each such group.
Option 1 can help in addition, in particular if for some reason only
some of the stanzas are sung. (Happens more often than not for those
pieces in churches here.) Italics I prefer if text is given in several
languages.
If you go for readability, however... As a singer, I prefer if
additional stanzas are written after the score, like a poem, and only <=
3 are printed between the staves. More than 4 stanzas (at most, and
only if there is no fifth one) are too difficult for me to catch easily.
In particular, if you have a usual SATB setting with >= 2 staves, the
lower voices notoriously have trouble with large distance between notes
and first stanza.
OTOH, if the singers get the melody after three stanzas, it suffices to
have them as a "poem" (in particular if you can avoid page turns in
between). If they don't get the melody, they have to rehearse the piece
anyway to coordinate lyrics even if you print eleven stanzas below the
notes, and once they rehearsed, the "poem" will be enough again.
Just my two pence...
HTH,
Alexander
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