The Neume Font

But the neumes' names don't abbreviate to single characters very well. (Let's see, a `p' must be a porrectus, no, a pressus, maybe a pes.) So I ended up using characters whose shapes reminded me of the neumes they were to represent. Hence `w' ended up as the key for a quilisma. (And thus, as you've no doubt already noted, I came up with a mnemonic scheme for remembering neumes.)

The keys for the simple neumes are as follows:

Name	Neume	Key
Virga		l
Pes		/
Clivis		n
Porrectus		u
Torculus		a
Pressus		:
Pressus subpunctus		;
Pressus liquescens		m
Quilisma		w
Punctum		.
Stropha		,
Oriscus		s
Epiphonus		d
Cephalicus		p

I defined this font so that the neumes would join if you stuck two of them together. So, theoretically, that's all you have to do to create a compound neume. But in practice, I found that I had to modify some of the neumes to get forms that would combine smoothly. I used (mostly) capital letters for these compound variants:

The keys for the compound variants are as follows:

Name	Neume	Key
Pes		-
Porrectus		U
Quilisma		W
Epiphonus		D
Cephalicus		P
Liquescens		J

(The liquescens is almost never used as a simple neume. It's always tacked on to the end of another neume.)

And so, the compound neumes from the previous page can be represented like this:

Name	Neume	Key
Pes-porrectus		-u
Pes-pressus subpunctis		-;
Porrectus-clivis		Un
Quilisma-cephalicus		WP
Quilisma-porrectus		Wu