On Mon, 22 Jun 2026, Mark Knoop wrote: > I would strongly advise against this. The comma already has a specific and > common musical meaning. Almost any other punctuation glyph would be > preferable, e.g. an asterisk. >
Thank you for your reply, Mark! My initial idea here is the comma because it most resembles the symbol that I, as a singer, pencil into my own scores when my choirmaster says something like “take an eighth off.” By the “specific and common musical meaning,” do you mean “a brief, silent pause, during which metrical time is not counted” (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesura#Music)? My hope is that if the comma is centered directly over the rest, it’s clear that it’s an annotation on the rest. And my output is mostly Renaissance polyphony, where basically no one would ever expect or see a comma used to mean “a pause in which metrical time is not counted.” (At least, I’ve never seen an edition of polyphony that uses a comma in this way.) But I don’t want to confuse people, especially people outside my choir if I share my scores more widely. Looking at B.14 List of breath marks (LilyPond Notation Reference) <https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.27/Documentation/notation/list-of-breath-marks> I see that there are other options that I could consider, such as 'tickmark. I’ll think about possible alternatives to \musicglyph "comma".
