Questions on ancient music

[Nancho Alvarez]

Hello!
I have edited the  motet "o vos omnes" by the spanish composer Tomas 
Luis de Victoria from XVI century:
http://www.uma.es/grupovocal/ovos.ly
http://www.uma.es/grupovocal/ovos.pdf
you can see the original source in 
http://tomasluisdevictoria.org/originales.html

I used Pedro's lilypond-snapshot 2.4.1
I would like to make some questions and comments:


1- In the lilypond manual I have seen a template of ancient music, and 
among other nice features it includes
    a way to make an "incipit" to put the original clefs. In my edition 
I used a different approach using two
    lovely features of lilypond:
                -use a complete score containing only the incipit  as 
the value of Staff.instrument
                -multiply each note in the incipit for a convenient 
fraction to make all the same length.
  It looks quite good, but maybe the lilypond hackers out there can 
improve it to make it look better.



2- Other lovely feature of lilypond is the ancient ligatures, marked 
with \[ and \]
   In the output it looks very good, but at compile time there is a 
warning for each ligature:
    "warning: Programming error: 
Ligature_engraver::stop_translation_timestep (): junking empty ligature"
    Am I doing something wrong?



3- With the new versions of lilypond the lyrics are applied to the text 
nicely, now the extensors and hyphens for melismas
   work great (by the way, in the manual it is still described the old 
behaviour of long hypens).
  But I found very unconfortable to write \melisma and \melismaEnd to 
mark the melismas.
  I know that can use ( and ), and them make the curves invisible, but 
I do not know if it is the best solution.
  I would like to ask to the developers if in the future (far o near) 
will be support  to mark the melismas in the
  lyrics section, I mean, to put something like {ag -- _ _ _ _ _ nus De 
-- _ _ _ _ i } to achieve the same effect
  than the \melisma \melismaEnd mechanism. This point is very important 
for me.



4- In the ancient music not every accidental was notated, the so called 
musica ficta was supposed to be sung by the performer
    without being written. In modern notation, the common way to notate 
it is a small accidental on top of the note.
    Currently, I use  cautionary accidentals, see for example bar 22 of 
the bassus. It would be very good, to have
    an option to notate cautionary as a small accidental on top of the 
note (and other option to put it on top and between parenthesis, for
    editorial accidentals). Currently it can be done with \markup but 
it does not translate to the MIDI output, nor it can be transposed.
  

5-  Bug or feature?
    In bar 62 of the cantus, there are two G sharp (it is the same 
music than in bar 27), it happens because there is
    a change of line. Is that normal?  I would prefer only one sharp 
sign to be printed.


6-  Other usual notation in ancient music is a square bracket (similar 
to the ligature) but with a dashed line, indicating that the original source
     has black notes. You can see an example in the original source of 
the bassus part, corresponding to bar 22. I do not know exactly the meaning
    of black notation, but good editions always mark it. As far as I 
know, it is not possible to do it with lily, will this feature be 
included in the future?


Please forgive me for this long post.
Thanks to the developers of lilypond for such a wonderful program!

                  NANCHO

P.D. If somebody sings in a choir, try this motet, it is one of the most 
beautiful pieces of music ever written.