A custos (plural: custodes; latin word for `guard') is a symbol that appears at the end of a staff. It anticipates the pitch of the first note(s) of the following line and thus helps the player or singer to manage line breaks during performance, thus enhancing readability of a score.
Custodes were frequently used in music notation until the 17th century. Nowadays, they have survived only in a few particular forms of musical notation such as contemporary editions of Gregorian chant like the editio vaticana. There are different custos glyphs used in different flavours of notational style.
For typesetting custodes, just put a Custos_engraver into the
Staff context when declaring the \paper
block,
as shown in the following example:
\paper { \translator { \StaffContext \consists Custos_engraver Custos \override #'style = #'mensural } }
The result looks like this:
The custos glyph is selected by the style
property. The styles
supported are vaticana
, medicaea
, hufnagel
and
mensural
. They are demonstrated in the following fragment:
If the boolean property adjust-if-on-staffline
is set to
#t
(which it is by default), lily typesets slightly different
variants of the custos glyph, depending on whether the custos, is
typeset on or between stafflines. The glyph will
optically fit well into the staff, with the appendage on the right of
the custos always ending at the same vertical position between two
stafflines regardless of the pitch. If you set
adjust-if-on-staffline
to #f
, then
a compromise between both forms is used.
Just like stems can be attached to noteheads in two directions
up and down, each custos glyph is available with its
appendage pointing either up or down. If the pitch of a custos is
above a selectable position, the appendage will point downwards; if
the pitch is below this position, the appendage will point upwards.
Use property neutral-position
to select this position. By
default, it is set to 0
, such that the neutral position is the
center of the staff. Use property neutral-direction
to control
what happens if a custos is typeset on the neutral position itself.
By default, this property is set to -1
, such that the appendage
will point downwards. If set to 1
, the appendage will point
upwards. Other values such as 0
are reserved for future
extensions and should not be used.
input/regression/custos.ly
.
This page is for LilyPond-2.0.1 (stable-branch).