Dear David, as a small addition and a partly similar answer to Urs’, I think the point is: LilyPond tries to suggest (or even enforce as a default) conventions of classic music notation. This comprises for example that clefs are repeated for each line but the time signature isn’t.
In your case, that means: The key signature can depend on the instrument and can be different for each staff. But in most cases, the time signature is the same within a score (across staves). You can have polyrhythmical music in LilyPond but it is not the default. So while this looks inconsistent from the purely programmatical point of view, it makes sense for most music. Cheers, Joram _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user