Adding a section label over the staff

Question

I'm trying to add some text to mark the sections in the score, and I'm doing this with the \sectionLabel command. The following snippet doesn't seem to work though; no text appears at all. What am I missing?

\version "2.22.1"
\include "lilypond-book-preamble.ly"                                                                         

\score {
    \relative c'{
    \sectionLabel "Verse"
    e e e2 | e4 e e2 | e4 g c, d | e1 |
    }
}

I'm running GNU LilyPond 2.22.1 together with plain latex, installed on MacOS through homebrew.

Answer 1

The command \section and \sectionLabel are new. These commands don't exist in v2.22. You need to be running v2.23 for these command to work.

One way to tell this is by comparing these pages of the documentation:

• https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/writing-text
• https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/notation/writing-text

The v2.22 page doesn't mention \sectionLabels at all, while the v2.23 page does.

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I'm running v2.23 and your scrip works fine.

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One workaround (if you don't want to upgrade to v2.23) is to change \sectionLabel "Verse" to \mark "Verse". The output won't be exactly the same, but it's very similar.