Beams across bars

The normalshapemediumseriesnormalshapemediumseries\barre macro inserts glue and terminates spacing account. Thus it is not compatible with pending beams and this is the usual way most composers wrote their scores, at least until the beginning of the XIX-th century. Unfortunately, later composers (BRAHMS, SCRIABIN, etc.) wanted to write beams jumping across bars.

This can be partly handled by MusicTEX, using the macro normalshapemediumseriesnormalshapemediumseries\xbeambarre^2.21 which puts a bar line of global width normalshapemediumseries\elemskip with no glue around. Bar counting is done for normalshapemediumseriesnormalshapemediumseries\autolines purpose but no line breaking can occur which mean the beams going across line of page breaks are not supported.

We give an example from BRAHMS's Intermezzo op. 118,1 provided by Miguel FILGUEIRAS:

whose coding is:

\begin{music}
\def\interfacteur{13}
\def\nbinstruments{1}
\nbporteesi=2\relax
\cleftoksi={6000}
\generalmeter{\allabreve}
\debutextrait
\normal
\off{1em}\temps\Notes\qp\nextstaff\Ilegu0r\zq{q}\ql{j}\enotes
\barre
\Notes\qsk\ibu0a1\qh0{CEJLcL}\relax
\nextstaff\qsk\rw{l}\pt{p}\zh{_p}\pt{i}\hl{_i}\enotes
\Notes\qh0J\itenl1a\qh0a\nextstaff\tleg0\zq{o}\ql{h}\enotes
\xbeambarre
\Notes\zh{.L.a}\hl{.e}\relax
\nextstaff\tten1\qb0{chj}\tbl0\qb0l\cl{q}\ds\enotes
\Notes\qp\nextstaff\zq{q}\ql{j}\enotes
\finextrait
 \end{music}