7.6 File structure

The bigger part of this manual is concerned with entering various forms of music in LilyPond. However, many music expressions are not valid input on their own, for example, a .ly file containing only a note

c'4

will result in a parsing error. Instead, music should be inside other expressions, which may be put in a file by themselves. Such expressions are called toplevel expressions. This section enumerates them all.

A .ly file contains any number of toplevel expressions, where a toplevel expressions is one of the following

• An output definition, such as \paper, \midi and \layout. Such a definition at toplevel changes the default settings for the block entered.
• A \header block. This sets the global header block. This is the block containing the definitions for book-wide settings, like composer, title, etc.
• An \addquote statement. See Quoting other voices for more information.
• A \score block. This score will be collected with other toplevel scores, and combined as a single \book.

  This behavior can be changed by setting the variable toplevel-score-handler at toplevel. The default handler is defined in the init file scm/lily.scm.

• A \book block logically combines multiple movements (i.e., multiple \score blocks) into one document. A number of \scores creates a single output file, where all movement are concatenated..

  This behavior can be changed by setting the variable toplevel-book-handler at toplevel. The default handler is defined in the init file scm/lily.scm.

• A compound music expression, such as

       { c'4 d' e'2 }
  

  This will add the piece in a \score, and formats it into a single book together with all other toplevel \scores and music expressions.

  This behavior can be changed by setting the variable toplevel-music-handler at toplevel. The default handler is defined in the init file scm/lily.scm.

The following example shows three things which may be entered at toplevel

\layout {
  % movements are non-justified by default
  raggedright = ##t
}

\header {
   title = "Do-re-mi"
}

{ c'4 d' e2 }

At any point in a file, any of the following lexical instructions can be entered:

• \version
• \include
• \encoding
• \renameinput

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