Hallelujah -- Adventures in LilyPond 5: Lyrics and a twist

Finally, adding words

To complete the lead sheet, I add the lyrics for the song.  It's quite straightforward.  The only things I need to remember is to 1) set the input mode to \lyricmode to distinguish from note input, 2) to split up syllables, and 3) to add double underscores to extend syllables:

firstVerseWords = \lyricmode {
    I heard there was a sec -- ret chord
    that Da -- vid played and it pleased the Lord,
    but you don't real -- ly care for mu -- sic, do ya?
    It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth,
    the mi -- nor fall, the ma -- jor lift.
    The baff -- led king com -- po -- sing Hal -- le -- lu -- jah
}

    \lyricmode {
        O __ O __ A __
    }

So!  I'm done with the song (this is the point in time when I wrote the latest blog post: I've been blogging in parallell with working on the song).  Print it out and distribute it to the choir members, and...

Crash and burn

Remember that I used two different sets of notes as source material?  And that I selected a verse (the last one) that I didn't have any notes for?  Turns out that I made a couple of minor mistakes merging the notes, causing errors in rhythm that were possible to sing past with only brief hiccups during rehearsal.  I'm usually quite meticulous; three errors in transcription in a 39-measure song is quite a negative record for me.  Oops.

Worse, in one measure I thought I needed to have a 4-8-8-8-8-4-8-4. rhythm to the lyrics "even though it all went wrong, I'll".  And boy, did it all go wrong.  The piano stopped, the choir leader went WHAT.  I had tried to sing through the notes as I went along, but in this place I must have sung something else than what I put down as notes, because this is unsingable.  The choir leader quickly saw that a plain 4-8-4-8-4-8-4-8 rhythm worked and went through with the rehearsals, but I was mortified to say the least.

This project was my pride and joy: how could I have been so sloppy?  Well, I did spend a lot of time comparing notes, but I made the basic mistake of comparing with an early version of my own notes(!), so some early errors were preserved to the end.  I kept meaning to go back and compare with the notes my choir leader had given me to work from, but I never did: hence the small mistakes.

The big mistake was caused by trying to do something I hadn't really done before: joining new lyrics with existing music.  Cohen's lyrics are sometimes quirky when it comes to rhythm and I had already discovered that I needed to be flexible.  For most of the verse, I managed to get it right, but in this one measure, I overdid it and failed badly.

The moral of this would seem to be: "don't get cocky".  I was ambitious and enthusiastic, which are nice things to be but perhaps conducive to being speedy and careless.  I kept thinking I was working on something New and Improved, so I was less inclined than usual to look back to the prior art, and even prepared to do some experimenting on my own.  Ah well, lesson learned I hope.

"And even though it all went wrong, I'll stand before the Lord of Song, with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah"...