I. Oppenheim writes:
| On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Joerg Anders wrote:
|
| > Is there a possibility to place braces inside brackes
| > in staff layout. I tried:
| >
| > %%staves [ S1 { S2 S3 } S4 | ]
|
| That is not possible. What would be the meaning of
| such a notation?
|
| You can of course typeset:
| %%staves [S1 S2] {S3 S4} [S5 S6]
Of course, the main answer is that braces and brackets are used
idiosyncratically, and mean whatever they meant to whoever wrote out
the music. If the above is what you see on the page, you'd like the
abc to mimic it.
But there is a common convention: Braces are used to group multiple
staves for one player (e.g., keyboards). Brackets indicate groups of
voices. With this understanding, it's easy to think up examples where
you might want such nesting.
Suppose, for example, you were writing a work for chorus,
harpsichord, organ, and orchestra. Perhaps it's for some festive
occasion at your church. A reasonable way of grouping the staves in
the score might be something like:
%%staves [Fl1 Fl2] ... [V1 V2 Va Vc] [S A T B] [{HR HL} {OR OL OP}]
Here, the two keyboards make an instrumental group, so they are
bracketed. Each keyboard instrument needs 2 or 3 staves, so they are
marked by braces. If you can't do the nexting, you either end up with
5 "keyboard" staves within the brackets, or you drop the brackets and
just use the braces. Personally, I'd forget about the brackets. Who
needs them? But if you believe in the above convention for brackets
and braces, you might want them nested like this.
Sounds reasonable to me.
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