Next: , Previous: Ancient flags, Up: Ancient notation



3.15.6 Ancient time signatures

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

[image of music]

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 mimics the look of historical printings of the 16th century.

input/test/time.ly gives an overview over all available ancient and modern styles.

See also

Program reference: Time signature gives a general introduction into the use of time signatures.

Bugs

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.

Read comments on this page, or add one.

This page is for LilyPond-2.2.6 (stable-branch).

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