The little story of musical notation 1/4
October 17th, 2008 | Theory | One Response | By Pierre-ArnaudI’ve always been interested in musical notation and its evolution. I’ve so decided to share this center of interest with you and write this little story of the musical notation in five parts.
For several thousand years, music was mostly handed down verbally without leaving a written trace. Regardless, since the origin of writing, it is possible to find some localized attempts of musical notations. A Babylonian tablet dated from the 16th century BC attests these attempts and lets us see a musical notation based on writing (alphabetic letters and grammatical accents).
By the 6th century BC, the Greeks posed the problem of notation a bit further. Alypius, whose introduction to music came to us partly, let us to get a precise idea of what the greek notation was at this time.
The greek system involved two signs for each degree of a given mode: one corresponding to an instrumental notation and another to a vocal notation.
The instrumental notation was composed of sixteen fixed signs, sorted into two octaves. In accord with theory, each sign could take three positions. According to its position, either natural, reversed (seen as in a mirror) or flattened, you had to play the sound either natural, either a half tone, or a quarter tone higher.
The vocal notation was less organized, simply constituted by the 24 letters of the greek alphabet, from alpha to omega. The Greeks, as we do, wrote musical signs above the text and the syllabs gave their length to sounds, thus avoiding use of rhytmical signs. Originally, rhythmic and metric were thus mixed together. Indeed, the vocal music occupied such a place that only the verbal aspect of musical rhythm remained. With the development of instrumental music, the rhythmic emphasized and became a discipline of its own. The greek notation system turns out to be a complex alphabetic system, mainly dealing with sounds height.
See you soon for the next part!
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December 2nd, 2008, 8:47 am
[...] the first episode of this little story of musical notation, we were mainly focused on Greeks. Following this tradition, the western medieval musical notation [...]