I know how to do what you did, but I want an above-notehead articulation, not a dynamic. It should look like a backwards accent next to a regular accent, centered over the notehead
Here is another, from Brahms’s Requiem (not that it is applied to instruments and voices). Rob is correct that it’s essentially a miniaturized messa di voce. Dorico doesn’t have that “articulation,” just the later form of messa di voce that fills the width of the note.
It is interesting – the first time I saw this articulation, and figured out it from the context and the meaning of the mark itself that it meant a kind of kindler, gentler accent (see in the Schoenberg that it is used for the top notes of each of those chords, passed around to create a “Klangfarbenmelodie” – and an accent would be too much), I realized that the accent itself is a fast and cramped hairpin! In 18/19 cent manuscripts, it isn’t always easy to tell the difference between a short hairpin and a messy accent.
Yes, there is a difficulty herre, particularly in Schubert who had a habit of writing accents and diminuendo hairpins that are hard to distinguish on visual grounds. For instance the same score of the Great C Major Symphony referred to above has a long diminuendo on the last note of the finale, as at the end of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. It is nowadays generally agreed that this was intended by Schubert as an accent at the beginning of the note.