Re: New ancient time signature?

[Michael Lauer]

Laura Conrad <lconrad <at> laymusic.org> writes:

> 
> 
> The documentation for ancient time signatures
>
<http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.11/Documentation/user/lilypond/Ancient-time-signatures>
> (it doesn't seem to have changed noticeably since 2.10, which is what
> I'm actually using) has a circle with a dot inside and a left half circle
> with a dot inside, but no right half circle with a dot inside.
> 
> I'm transcribing something from Morley's "Plaine and Easie..."
> (neither plain nor easy from the point of view of a 21st century
> musician) which uses the right half circle with a dot.  The modern
> transcription I have access to seems to believe he meant a 12/4 time
> signature when he wrote that.
> 
> Would it be easy to add this symbol?  If it's easy but not trivial,
> would the person for whom it's easy like to point me to a starting
> place so I could take a crack at it?
> 

Hi Laura,

I don't know how to add new glyphs to the font, but I can tell you how
I worked around what sounds like exactly the same problem in transcribing 
Billings pieces; he (and other early American composers, and shapenote
tunebooks) used what looks like an upside-down and backwards cut-time sign 
for the "allegro mood of time."

I did the following (you would substitute the proper glyph name; 
I think you want timesig.neomensural.68)

# (define (tsaFn grob)
  (interpret-markup
   (ly:grob-layout grob)
   '(( ))
   (markup #:rotate 180 #:musicglyph "timesig.C22")))

tsAllegro = { \once \override Staff.TimeSignature #'stencil = 
              #tsaFn \time 2/2 \tempo 2=60 }
              
And then used \tsAllegro instead of \time 2/2.

Hope that helps,
Michael