I see you've found the Wikipedia article I was going to cite; as a
singer and former instrumentalist (woodwinds and cello), I would
strongly suggest the caesura rather than a comma. Singers and wind
players breathe when they see commas; a comma over a rest would give
rise to much head scratching.
Colin
On 2026-06-22 12:13, Gabriel Ellsworth wrote:
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
<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".
