7.3.2 Entering lyrics

Lyrics are entered in a special input mode. This mode is introduced by the keyword \lyricmode, or by using \addlyrics or \lyricsto. In this mode you can enter lyrics, with punctuation and accents, and the input d is not parsed as a pitch, but rather as a one letter syllable. Syllables are entered like notes, but with pitches replaced by text. For example,

\lyricmode { Twin-4 kle4 twin- kle litt- le star2 }

There are two main methods to specify the horizontal placement of the syllables, either by specifying the duration of each syllable explicitly, like in the example above, or by automatically aligning the lyrics to a melody or other voice of music, using \addlyrics or \lyricsto. For more details see The Lyrics context.

A word or syllable of lyrics begins with an alphabetic character, and ends with any space or digit. The following characters can be any character that is not a digit or white space. One important consequence of this is that a word can end with }. The following example is usually a mistake in the input file. The syllable includes a }, so the opening brace is not balanced

\lyricmode { twinkle}

Similarly, a period which follows an alphabetic sequence is included in the resulting string. As a consequence, spaces must be inserted around property commands

\override Score . LyricText #'font-shape = #'italic

In order to assign more than one syllable to a single note, you can surround them with quotes or use a _ character, to get spaces between syllables, or use tilde symbol (~) to get a lyric tie.

     
     \time 3/4
     \relative { c2 e4 g2 e4 }
     \addlyrics { gran- de_a- mi- go }
     \addlyrics { pu- "ro y ho-" nes- to }
     \addlyrics { pu- ro~y~ho- nes- to }

The lyric ties is implemented with the Unicode character U+203F, so be sure to have a font (Like DejaVuLGC) installed that includes this glyph.

To enter lyrics with characters from non-English languages, or with accented and special characters (such as the heart symbol or slanted quotes), simply insert the characters directly into the input file and save it with utf-8 encoding. See Text encoding for more info.

     
     \relative { e4 f e d e f e2 }
     \addlyrics { He said: “Let my peo ple go”. }

To use normal quotes in lyrics, add a backslash before the quotes. For example,

     
     \relative c' { \time 3/4 e4 e4. e8 d4 e d c2. }
     \addlyrics { "\"I" am so lone- "ly\"" said she }

The full definition of a word start in Lyrics mode is somewhat more complex.

A word in Lyrics mode begins with: an alphabetic character, _, ?, !, :, ', the control characters ^A through ^F, ^Q through ^W, ^Y, ^^, any 8-bit character with ASCII code over 127, or a two-character combination of a backslash followed by one of ‘’, , ", or ^.

To define indentifiers containing lyrics, the function lyricmode must be used.

verseOne = \lyricmode { Joy to the world the Lord is come }
\score {
  <<
    \new Voice = "one" \relative c'' {
      \autoBeamOff
      \time 2/4
      c4 b8. a16 g4. f8 e4 d c2
    }
    \addlyrics { \verseOne }
  >>
}

See also

Program reference: LyricText, LyricSpace.