5.16.1 Ancient note heads

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.

See also

Examples: input/regression/note-head-style.ly gives an overview over all available note head styles.

Other languages: English.
Using automatic language selection.