There is limited support for mensural time signatures. The
glyphs are hard-wired to particular time fractions. In other words,
to get a particular mensural signature glyph with the \time n/m
command, n
and m
have to be chosen according to the
following table:
Use the style
property of grob TimeSignature to
select ancient time signatures. Supported styles are
neo_mensural
and mensural
. The above table uses the
neo_mensural
style. This style is appropriate e.g. for the
incipit of transcriptions of mensural pieces. The mensural
style mimicks the look of historical printings of the 16th century.
input/test/time.ly
gives an overview over all available
ancient and modern styles.
Mensural signature glyphs are mapped to time fractions in a
hard-wired way. This mapping is sensible, but still arbitrary: given
a mensural time signature, the time fraction represents a modern meter
that usually will be a good choice when transcribing a mensural piece
of music. For a particular piece of mensural music, however, the
mapping may be unsatisfactory. In particular, the mapping assumes a
fixed transcription of durations (e.g. brevis = half note in 2/2,
i.e. 4:1). Some glyphs (such as the alternate glyph for 6/8 meter)
are not at all accessible through the \time
command.
Mensural time signatures are supported typographically, but not yet musically. The internal representation of durations is based on a purely binary system; a ternary division such as 1 brevis = 3 semibrevis (tempus perfectum) or 1 semibrevis = 3 minima (cum prolatione maiori) is not correctly handled: event times in ternary modes will be badly computed, resulting e.g. in horizontally misaligned note heads, and bar checks are likely to erroneously fail.
The syntax and semantics of the \time
command for mensural
music is subject to change.
This page is for LilyPond-2.0.0 (stable-branch).