Mensural Notation

Note shapes began to record duration, letting polyphony be designed with exact proportions.

Related

MedievalRhythmTime SignatureTuplet

Fourteenth-century composers began to write duration with the shapes of notes, not only pitch. Length, proportion and grouping entered the page, and music could be designed as exactly as a building.

Time and place

The late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in Paris and Italy. Philippe de Vitry's Ars Nova treatise dates from around 1320; Machaut wrote the Messe de Nostre Dame at Reims around 1360–1365.

What happened

Mensural notation used longa, brevis, semibrevis and minima to show relative duration, while mensuration signs and coloured notes fixed the grouping of threes and twos. Triple time had long been called perfect; duple time became legitimate in the Ars Nova. Notes could be ligated, syncopated and inverted, and rhythm became an independent layer. Machaut set the five movements of the ordinary Mass as one continuous polyphonic structure, with the proportions of the voices locked on the page.

What changed

Music moved from recording pitch to recording time. Composers could build large cycles, singers could reproduce the same rhythm far away, and a manuscript became a work that could travel. The whole note, half note, barline and time signature all descend from this system. Notation no longer merely preserved sound; it shaped what sound could be conceived to be.

Listen for the turn

In Machaut's Mass, hear how four voices offset one another inside a single grid. In the Florentine Gloria, hear triple and duple groupings alternate. Then hear Machaut's chanson, where note shapes fix rhythm in a secular song as well. The library versions are synthesized; follow the proportions between the voices.

Related

This turn belongs to Medieval and connects directly to Rhythm, Time Signature and Tuplet.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "Notation, III: Mensural notation" — dates and terms checked, not quoted
• Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford University Press) — narrative checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.