Transcript History of Music Notation

History of Music Notation
Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque,
Classical, and Romantic
Music Notation
• Music notation or musical notation is any
system used to visually represent aurally
perceived music through the use of written
symbols, including ancient or modern musical
symbols. Types and methods of notation have
varied between cultures and throughout
history, and much information about ancient
music notation is fragmentary.
Music Notation
• Although many ancient cultures used symbols
to represent melodies, none of them is nearly
as comprehensive as written language,
limiting our modern understanding.
Comprehensive music notation began to be
developed in Europe in the Middle Ages, and
has been adapted to many kinds of music
worldwide.
Oxyrhynchus Hymn
• The Oxyrhynchus hymn (or P. Oxy. XV 1786) is
the earliest known manuscript of a Christian
hymn to contain both lyrics and musical
notation. It is found on Papyrus 1786 of the
Oxyrhynchus papyri, now kept at the
Papyrology Rooms of the Sackler Library,
Oxford. The manuscript was discovered in
1918, and later published in 1922. The hymn
was written around the end of the 3rd century
AD.
Oxyrhynchus Hymn
Oxyrhynchus Hymn
• The Phos Hilaron and the Oxyrhynchus hymn constitute the earliest
extant Christian Greek hymn texts reasonably certain to have been
used in Christian worship, but are neither drawn from the Bible nor
modeled on Biblical passages.
• . . . together all the eminent ones of God. . .
• . . . night] nor day (?) Let it/them be silent. Let the luminous stars
not [. . .],
• . . . [Let the rushings of winds, the sources] of all surging rivers
[cease]. While we hymn
• Father and Son and Holy Spirit, let all the powers answer, "Amen,
amen, Strength, praise,
• [and glory forever to God], the sole giver of all good things. Amen,
amen."
Music Notation, Europe
• Scholar and music theorist Isidore of Seville,
writing in the early 7th century, considered that
"unless sounds are held by the memory of man,
they perish, because they cannot be written
down.“ By the middle of the 9th century,
however, a form of neumatic notation began to
develop in monasteries in Europe as a mnemonic
device for Gregorian chant, using symbols known
as neumes; the earliest surviving musical
notation of this type is in the Musica disciplina of
Aurelian of Réôme, from about 850.
Notation, Europe
• There are scattered survivals from the Iberian
Peninsula before this time, of a type of
notation known as Visigothic neumes, but its
few surviving fragments have not yet been
deciphered. The problem with this notation
was that it only showed melodic contours and
consequently the music could not be read by
someone who did not know the music already.
Neumes
• The earliest neumes were inflective marks which
indicated the general shape but not necessarily
the exact notes or rhythms to be sung. Later
developments included the use of heightened
neumes which showed the relative pitches
between neumes, and the creation of a four-line
musical staff that identified particular pitches.
Neumes do not generally indicate rhythm, but
additional symbols were sometimes juxtaposed
with neumes to indicate changes in articulation,
duration, or tempo.
Neumes
• . Neumatic notation was later used in
medieval music to indicate certain patterns of
rhythm called rhythmic modes, and eventually
evolved into modern musical notation.
Neumatic notation remains standard in
modern editions of plainchant
Gregorian Chant
Neumes
• Around the 9th century neumes began to
become shorthand mnemonic aids for the
proper melodic recitation of chant. A
prevalent view is that neumatic notation was
first developed in the Eastern Roman Empire.
This seems plausible given the welldocumented peak of musical composition and
cultural activity in major cities of the empire
(now regions of southern Turkey, Syria,
Lebanon and Israel) at that time.
Neumes
• The corpus of extant Byzantine music in
manuscript and printed form is far larger than
that of the Gregorian chant, due in part to the
fact that neumes fell in disuse in the west
after the rise of modern staff notation and
with it the new techniques of polyphonic
music, while the Eastern tradition of Greek
orthodox church music and the reformed
neume notation remains alive until today.
Notation
• Notation had developed far enough to notate
melody, but there was still no system for
notating rhythm. A mid-13th-century treatise,
De Mensurabili Musica, explains a set of six
rhythmic modes that were in use at the time,
although it is not clear how they were formed.
These rhythmic modes were all in triple time
and rather limited rhythm in chant to 6
different repeating patterns.
Notation
• This was a flaw seen by German music theorist
Franco of Cologne and summarized as part of
his treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis (the art of
measured chant, or Mensural notation). He
suggested that individual notes could have
their own rhythms represented by the shape
of the note. Not until the 14th century did
something like the present system of fixed
note lengths arise. The use of regular
measures (bars) became commonplace by the
Early Notation
Medieval
Renaissance
Harpsichord
• A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means
of a keyboard. It produces sound by plucking a string
when a key is pressed.
•
• "Harpsichord" designates the whole family of similar
plucked keyboard instruments, including the smaller
virginals, muselar, and spinet.
•
• The harpsichord was widely used in Renaissance and
Baroque music. During the late 18th century, it
gradually disappeared from the musical scene with the
rise of the piano. But in the 20th century, it made a
resurgence, being used in historically informed
performances of older music, in new (contemporary)
compositions, and in popular culture.
Ruckers/Taskin Harpsichord,
1646/1780
Telemann (1681-1767)
Bach (1685-1750) Suite for Lute
Fortepiano
• Fortepiano designates the early version of the
piano, from its invention by the Italian instrument
maker Bartolomeo Cristofori around 1700 up to
the early 19th century. It was the instrument for
which Haydn, Mozart, and the early Beethoven
wrote their piano music. Starting in Beethoven's
time, the fortepiano began a period of steady
evolution, culminating in the late 19th century
with the modern grand. The earlier fortepiano
became obsolete and was absent from the
musical scene for many decades. In the 20th
century the fortepiano was revived, following the
rise of interest in historically informed
performance. Fortepianos are built for this
Cristofori, Florence, 1720
Fortepiano, Stein, 1775
Mozart (1756-1791), 1st Violin
Beethoven (1770-1827)
Shubert (1797-1828)
Chopin (1810-1849)
Listz (1811-1886)
Brahms (1833-1897)
Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
Why is chant called Gregorian?
• That "Gregorian" chant was named for and
credited to Pope Gregory I (r. 590-604) is an
accident of politics and spin doctoring. Tension
between the Pope (the Bishop of Rome) and
other Bishops regarding the authority of the Pope
as "first among equals" was matched by tension
between the Pope, as spiritual ruler of Rome, and
Rome's secular rulers. This tension was an off and
on thing until as late as the 15th century, when
the "Conciliar Conflict" (c. 1409-1460) pitted the
power of the Council of Bishops against the
The Rest of the Story
• Gregory I has been credited with many things,
including the writing, collecting, or organizing
of the body of plainchant in use at the time, as
well founding the first singing school (Schola
Cantorum) in Rome to train singers for the
church, organizing the church's annual cycle of
liturgical readings, and first establishing the
church's authority over the secular rulers of
Rome.
The Rest of the Story
• There are any number of lovely stories and
legends associated with Gregory. There are
paintings showing a bird singing chants into
his ear as he wrote them down.
(Unfortunately, of course, there was no usable
music notation at the time.) There are stories
of his sending out missionaries with
instructions to bring back any new music they
encountered, saying "Why should the Devil
have all the good songs?"
The Rest of the Story
• Whether he actually did any of these things is
questionable. They were attributed to him in
later centuries in an attempt to build up and
support the primacy of the papacy. Those who
attributed wondrous accomplishments to
Gregory were doing the same job that spin
doctors do today for politicians and
entertainers.
The Rest of the Story
• In point of fact, the chant that was used in
Gregory's time is now known as Old Roman,
which barely survived into the era of musical
notation, passing from one generation to the
next by ear. In about the year 800, two
centuries after Gregory's time, the Emperor
Charlemagne sent to Rome for authentic
liturgical books and chants. Singing teachers
were dispatched from Rome to teach the
Franks by ear, but they did not get along well
and the Franks made major changes in order
to adapt the chant to their taste and their
The Rest of the Story
• The chant of the Franks is the style that
eventually propagated. As a result, what we
call Gregorian chant should probably be called
Carolingian chant, but the easy way out is
simply to use the term plainchant and leave it
at that.