7.7.8 Custodes

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(s) of the following line thus helping the performer to manage line breaks during performance.

Custodes were frequently used in music notation until the 17th 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, as shown in the following example

\layout {
  \context {
    \Staff
    \consists Custos_engraver
    Custos \override #'style = #'mensural
  }
}

The result looks like this

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

See also

Program reference: Custos.

Examples: input/regression/custos.ly.