Reference: attributes

charset attribute

Character set

charset
Type	Element	Description	Use
%Charset; SGML token: CDATA	textual elements such as lyric and text	Character encoding of the resource	For using the appropriate character set (such as Western European languages or Japanese) for textual aspects of music.
%Charset;	music notation elements		For using a music-related character set for music glyph display.

Displaying a piece of music involves ordinary human language characters (such as Latin characters used for European languages) as well as specialized music characters, which as often a set of a different character set.

In order not to confuse a user agent with these different character sets, different meta declarations are necessary; one for textual elements, another for music notation elements.