White mensural ligatures - GNU LilyPond
Description: GNU LilyPond

Next: Gregorian square neumes ligatures, Up: Ligatures

##### 7.7.10.1 White mensural ligatures

There is limited support for white mensural ligatures.

To engrave white mensural ligatures, in the layout block put the Mensural_ligature_engraver into the Voice context, and remove the Ligature_bracket_engraver, like this

    \layout {
      \context {
        \Voice
        \remove Ligature_bracket_engraver
        \consists Mensural_ligature_engraver
      }
    }

There is no additional input language to describe the shape of a white mensural ligature. The shape is rather determined solely from the pitch and duration of the enclosed notes. While this approach may take a new user a while to get accustomed to, it has the great advantage that the full musical information of the ligature is known internally. This is not only required for correct MIDI output, but also allows for automatic transcription of the ligatures.

For example,

    \set Score.timing = ##f
    \set Score.defaultBarType = "empty"
    \override NoteHead #'style = #'neomensural
    \override Staff.TimeSignature #'style = #'neomensural
    \clef "petrucci-g"
    \[ c'\maxima g \]
    s4
    \[ d\longa c\breve f e d \]
    s4
    \[ c'\maxima d'\longa \]
    s4
    \[ e'1 a g\breve \]

Without replacing Ligature_bracket_engraver with Mensural_ligature_engraver, the same music transcribes to the following

##### Bugs

The invisible rests (`s4`) in the example are used to compensate for the poor horizontal spacing.

This page is for LilyPond-2.8.8 (stable-branch).

Other languages: English.
Using automatic language selection.