M-Tx handles melismas automatically based on the beams and slurs; this
is great, but not flexible enough (unless I'm missing something) in
cases where you have to override this default handling (and I often
have).
Consider the following example:
================================
Style: Singer
Meter: C
%% w2i
[ c8 d1 e1 ] [ d8 e1 f1 ] e2 |
L: A-men
================================
Now of course I want the first syllable of `Amen' to be a melisma of 6
notes, and the second syllable should be on the final half note.
The first thing I tried to achieve this is putting a slur around the
first six notes (I don't really want this though -- I often need
melismas *without* slurs). This doesn't work at all; M-Tx complains
about:
Melisma starts with slur but ends with beam: ERROR on line 5
no matter in what order I put the ( ) and [ ]. This looks like a bug to
me.
Putting in \beginmel\ and \endmel\ as inline TeX doesn't work either,
because they interfere with the \endmel commands that M-Tx puts in
itself.
What I end up doing now is this:
================================
Style: Singer
Meter: C
%% w2i
[ c8 d1 e1 ] [ \nolyr\ d8 e1 f1 ] e2 |
L: A-men
================================
This works quite well in this simple example, but it is a pain when
there are very long melismas. (Defining \let\nl=\nolyr\ helps some, but
not much.)
I suggest adding a new pair of commands to M-Tx to begin and end a
melisma; unfortunately I can't think of any characters that could be
used for this, but maybe someone else can. If { } were not already
taken, I would suggest to use them like this:
{ [ c8 d1 e1 ] [ d8 e1 f1 ] } e2 |
with proper nesting of any beams or slurs that might occur inside such a
group.
--
Stefan Haller
Berlin, Germany
http://www.snafu.de/~stk/
