3.6.1 Displaying LilyPond notation

Displaying a music expression in LilyPond notation can be done with the music function \displayLilyMusic. To see the output, you will typically want to call LilyPond using the command line. For example,

{
  \displayLilyMusic \transpose c a, { c4 e g a bes }
}

will display

{ a,4 cis e fis g }

By default, LilyPond will print these messages to the console along with all the other LilyPond compilation messages. To split up these messages and save the results of \displayLilyMusic, redirect the output to a file.

lilypond file.ly >display.txt

Note that Lilypond does not just display the music expression, but also interprets it (since \displayLilyMusic returns it in addition to displaying it). This is convenient since you can just insert \displayLilyMusic into existing music in order to get information about it. If you don’t actually want Lilypond to interpret the displayed music as well as display it, use \void in order to have it ignored:

{
  \void \displayLilyMusic \transpose c a, { c4 e g a bes }
}

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LilyPond — Notation Reference v2.18.2 (stable-branch).