Next: Figured bass support, Previous: Ligatures, Up: Ancient notation---common features
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 of the following line, thus helping the performer to manage line breaks during performance.
Custodes were frequently used in music notation until the seventeenth 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 flavors of notational style.
For typesetting custodes, just put a Custos_engraver into the
Staff context when declaring the \layout
block,
and change the style of the custos with an \override
if
desired, as shown in the following example:
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
Internals Reference: Custos.
Examples: Ancient notation.