For ancient notation, a note head style other than the default
style may be chosen. This is accomplished by setting the style
property of the
NoteHead (lilypond-internals)
object to baroque
,
neomensural
or mensural
. The baroque
style
differs from the default
style only in using a square shape
for \breve
note heads. The neomensural
style differs from
the baroque
style in that it uses rhomboidal heads for whole notes
and all smaller durations. Stems are centered on the note heads.
This style is particularly useful when transcribing mensural music,
e.g., for the incipit. The mensural
style finally produces note
heads that mimic the look of note heads in historic printings of the
16th century.
The following example demonstrates the neomensural
style
\set Score.skipBars = ##t \override NoteHead #'style = #'neomensural a'\longa a'\breve a'1 a'2 a'4 a'8 a'16
When typesetting a piece in Gregorian Chant notation, the
Gregorian_ligature_engraver (lilypond-internals)
will automatically select
the proper note heads, so there is no need to explicitly set the
note head style. Still, the note head style can be set, e.g., to
vaticana_punctum
to produce punctum neumes. Similarly, a
Mensural_ligature_engraver (lilypond-internals)
is used to automatically
assemble mensural ligatures. See Ligatures for how ligature
engravers work.
Examples: input/regression/note-head-style.ly gives an overview over all available note head styles.
This page is for LilyPond-2.5.11 (development-branch).