\set associatedVoice = #ALL (???)

[Monk Panteleimon]

I think I remember the lilypond essay saying 
that part of the objective with lilypond is to make the program
correspond as closely as possible to the logic of real music. I'd like to
point out one small place where it doesn't, in hopes that the
observation will be useful to the developers.

Every line of lyrics in lilypond has and associatedVoice. Even when
entering lyrics in lyricmode, lilypond by default uses the highest voice in
the score to align syllables and figure out lengths for syllable extenders. 
The problem with this is that in an awful lot of real vocal music, namely all
homorhythmic ("chorale style") arrangements for choir (this accounts for
lots and lots of choral works baroque and later, and certainly for
most of church hymnody) the lyrics aren't really associated with one voice,
but with all of them at once.

In such music, the syllables of the words generally start and end 
simultaneously in each voice, but the melismata do not. Lilypond 
doesn't know that. It thinks that every line of lyrics belongs 
rhythmically and ornamentally to a single melodic line. This
necessitates rather frequent overrides of both syllable-alignment and
LyricExtender length.

I'm not a programmer, but I imagine it must be possible to make something
called \set associatedVoice = #ALL , which would work like this:
The thing controlling the Lyric context takes account of the notes. 
For each syllable, it looks around and says "Any melismata out there?" 
If there aren't, well then fine.  If it turns out that there are, 
it left-aligns the syllable, according to duration (I'm assuming lyricmode 
here, since lyricsto would contradict my premise). After that it says 
"now which of you melismata takes up the longest horizontal space during
this beautiful moment of ornamental juxtaposition?" 
and whichever melisma takes the most space gets the LyricExtender extended 
according to the space needed for its notes. 
And everyone lives happily ever after in a well-aligned and beautiful
choral score.

Would that be difficult? It seems to me that the various note-bearing
contexts already do that with one another, or with something higher.
They all take account of one another, or they're all tied to the same musical 
moment, 
or something like that. Can the lyrics come too, rather than tagging along 
behind a single string of notes (like they don't really do in real choral 
music) ?

Muchas Gracias.

-- 
Monk Panteleimon
Hermitage of the Holy Cross
Wayne, WV, USA
address@hidden

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