Three Thousand Years of Notation

From neumes to staff notation, how writing turned sound into a text that could travel.

Related

MedievalRenaissanceRhythmOrgan

The question

Oral music lives in memory and apprenticeship. It can travel, but strangers far away cannot easily reproduce the same version. Notation has to let absent performers follow one set of rules, and once it succeeds music becomes a text as well as an event.

Historical arc

In the ninth century, monks drew neumes above chant texts, showing contour but not exact pitch. In the eleventh, Guido added staff lines and taught with solmization, giving pitch a coordinate. In the twelfth and thirteenth, polyphony at Notre Dame needed aligned voices, and rhythmic modes appeared. Mensural notation recorded duration through note shapes in the fourteenth century. Printing standardised the page in the fifteenth, barlines and key signatures settled in the seventeenth, and expression marks multiplied in the nineteenth. In the twentieth, graphic and text scores gave performers new freedom.

The turning point

The first turn came when rhythm entered the page. Neumes could carry melody but not keep voices together; mensural notation made time calculable and polyphony architectural. Printing sent identical scores to strangers, and recording later broke the score's monopoly on the work.

What to listen for

Begin with a chant and hear memory working through contour and cadence. Then hear Notre Dame organum, two voices tied to one rhythmic grid. Finally hear a Bach fugue, with subject and answer fixed on the page. The library versions are synthesised, so follow voice-leading rather than colour.

Related

This line runs through Medieval and Renaissance, with Rhythm and Organ.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "Notation" — historical outline checked, not quoted
• Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 1 (Oxford University Press) — narrative checked, not quoted

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