Custom note names, or meta-score?

[Craig Comstock]

Hello,

I am writing a piece for a 9 piece ensemble in which I want the players to choose 9 different pitches along with articulations and/or other additional symbols to indicate extended techniques and such. I want to take those 81 different “glyphs” if you will and generate a score and parts. The part I specify as the composer is only rhythm and which glyph to use.

I would like to bring along the pitch level and say stocatto, accent, things like that but keep them separated from rhythm.

So say ‘aa’ is middle C stocatto I could write { aa4 aa2 aa aa } which would be the same as { c’4-. c2-. c-. c-. }

At first I thought I might just use variables like

aa = { ‘c }

{ \aa4 \aa2 \aa \aa }

But that didn’t parse and is also an extra backslash and such I’d rather not have in there if possible.

So said another way, I’d like to write a meta-score like { aa4 aa2 aa aa ab ab ab ac ac ca ca } and those note names relate to a set of pitches determined maybe in another file (not code hopefully) so that as the pitches are chosen/changed it is easy to regenerate the score/parts.

So maybe something near https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/blob/master/scm/define-note-names.scm I could add in a list of pitch names from another file included in the score somehow?

Thanks!

Craig