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Custodes

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.

Syntax

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:

[picture of music]

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:

[picture of music]

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.

See also

Custos and input/regression/custos.ly.

This page is for LilyPond-2.0.0 (stable-branch).

Report errors to <bug-lilypond@gnu.org>.