Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup tuning history of musical notation (was: reversed text/score accidentals)

> From: jpehrson2 <jpehrson@rcn.com>
> To: <tuning@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2002 7:49 AM
> Subject: [tuning] Re: reversed text/score accidentals (was: Notation
individualists)
>
>
> --- In tuning@y..., "monz" <joemonz@y...> wrote:
>
> /tuning/topicId_34067.html#34067
>
> >
> > in writing a score, it's exactly the opposite, for
> > some reason i don't know. the example would be
> > written < b E, but with a notehead for the E instead
> > of the letter.
> >
>
> ****Thanks, Monz, for clarifying this... Well, that was simple
> enough. My guess is that, since there are *rhythmic* qualifiers,
> like dots and double dots after notes, traditionally, the accidentals
> couldn't go there...

yes, Joe, that's a very sensible observation!

> It would be interesting to trace the notational history of all this,
> since there obviously *is* one. That would also be a cool Monz web
> page...starting with the 4-line staff, neumes, etc., etc., etc. with,
> of course, the *tuning* implications...

yep . . . thanks for the suggestion. someday there will be a
definition of "notation" which lays out all the history.
i've been studying it for over 2 decades.

European musical notation started with neumes, which were
squiggly lines above the words which were intended to sort of
sketch out the shape of the melody on single syllables
(might might have a lot of notes if sustained a long time).
the neumes apparently developed from accent symbols that
would be written over Greek/Byzantine text. they spread
into Europe during the 800s-900s -- the Carolingian era
when the Franks were the greatest European power.

but the ancient Greeks also had a musical notation, two
different ones in fact, one called "vocal" and one called
"instrumental". the "vocal" notation used letters of the
Greek alphabet to indicate notes. the "instrumental"
notation used rotations of symbols, some of which are
Greek letters but the others of which seem to me to be
derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, which is
where the Greeks got the idea for their alphabet anyway.

the Greek name for those people, "Phonike", refers to the
sounds of speech (modern English word "phonics"). the
Akkadian (i.e, Babylonian) name for these people was
"Kaininu", which is a Semitic word related to the Hebrew
word which means "Canaanites". so they were apparently
the people who invented the modern type of alphabet where
each letter (symbol) represents approximately one phoneme.

older "alphabets" were really syllabaries, where one
sound represented an entire syllable -- a more modern
example is the Indian languages derived from Sanskrit,
or the scripts of the Dravidian languages of southern India.

anyway, back to medieval Europe . . . the treatise
_musica enchiriadis_, which has been dated variously
from c 860 - 950 AD, but which i believe is an earlier
work, has examples of "diastematic" notation, that is,
a system of parallel horizontal lines which represent
specific pitches, with T (for "tone") and S ("semitone")
written in the margins next to the lines, and with the
text written in the spaces.

(the _musica enchiriadis_ also presents, as its first
main topic, the so-called "daesian" notation, which was
an adaptation of Greek letters which would be rotated
for different tetrachords. i searched the web for an
example of daesian notation, but couldn't find one. but
i believe that the daesian notation means something
different from what everyone else believes. another
unpublished paper on which i've worked for years is
the one examining my interpretation of this fascinating
treatise.)

the gamut of pitches was basically simply a holdover
from the ancient Greek theory. the Greek version had
an ascending interval structure which we'd represent
today by A, B ... a, b-flat, b ... a', and which was
tone-semitone-tone.

because of the nature of the chant, and the fact that
D was viewed as the most important starting pitch,
the Franks realigned the tetrachords and added a new
note ("gamma") at the bottom, so that the whole system
was shifted a "tone" downward, G ... g', so that the
intervallic structure between degreees of the tetrachords
was different from the Greek: tone-tone-semitone. this
additional lower note "gamma" is where the word "gamut"
originated:
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/dict/gamut.htm

Hucbald (840-930 AD) was the theorist primarily responsible
for this reorientation of the tetrachords.

the neumes up to this time are called "campo aperto",
which means "open field", because the squiggly lines
showed a relative movement of melody but without any
reference pitch. one simply had to learn a chant by
rote, and the neumes were just there to help.

the type of vertical graphic thinking in the _musica
enchiridis_ eventually resulted in a reference line being
drawn across the "campo aperto" to represent a reference
pitch. it could be any note, but was generally C, F,
or G.

eventually this practice proved very useful, and scribes
began to use a line for all three notes, with letters at
the beginning to indicate which was which. this is the
origin of our modern clefs: G became the treble clef,
C became the C-clefs which are still moveable today
(alto and tenor clefs), and F became the bass clef.
it's impossible for me to show this evolution in an
email . . . hopefully i'll put together a graphic soon
that shows how it happened.

these lines were also often given different colors. so
you'd have a score with three lines on it with a lot of
space in between each line, since the intervals are:

treble G
"5th" <
middle C
"5th" <
bass F

it was Guido d'Arezzo, around 1050 or so, who hit on the
idea of using the diastematic notation of the _musica
enchiriadis_ for notating all the chants he needed to
teach to his students, and he also developed the solfege
syllables "ut - re - mi - fa - so - la" to represent the
pitches in each hexachord, which was his new system of
pitch organization:
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/dict/hexachd.htm

Guido used a 4-line staff, which became the standard
(and still is) for notating Greogorian chant. Composers
began adding other lines (i've seen up to 12), but
eventually settled on the 5-line staff as a standard.

even tho musicians thought in terms of hexachords,
as i explain here
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/dict/german-h.htm
the basic gamut of pitches used at that time was
2 octaves of the 7-tone diatonic scale plus the
Bb below middle-C.

the hexachord system was based on those 3 references
pitches (which is exactly why they became reference
pitches), and thus hexachords came in 3 versions:

hard G - A - B - C - D - E
natural C - D - E - F - G - A
soft F - G - A - Bb - C - D

the process of moving between different types of
hexachords by employing common-tones was called "mutation"
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/dict/mutation.htm

there came to be two written symbols for the two
different types of "B": round- (or "soft-") B and
square- (or "hard-") B. the German words "mol/molle"
(soft) and "dur" (hard) are still used today in many
European languages to describe the difference between
"major" and "minor".

musicians began to modulate more widely and thus
employed the idea of mutation to travel to different
tonal centers in addition to these 3.

essentially, mutation employed the "soft-b" to indicate
a modulation into the "soft" hexachord, whatever its
actual pitch might be. so the "soft-b" at this time
always indicated a r e l a t i v e and not an
absolute pitch.

the "soft-b" gradually evolved into our modern "flat"
symbol, and the "hard-b" evolved into both the "sharp"
and, later, the "natural" symbols.

during the 1300s -- the "manneristic" era when music was
composed with a rhythmic complexity that would not be
seen again until the 1900s -- modulation became very
popular, and by the end of the century the full chromatic
scale had evolved as the flat and sharp signs were
more and more often used to indicate absolute pitches.

around 1400, there was a sharp decline in chromaticism,
and over the next couple of centuries the notation
pretty much settled down into what we have today.

i've only addressed the notation of pitch here. of course,
there's a whole other aspect of musical notation which
is an entire study in itself: the notation of rhythm.
i defer to Margo and others who know more about that.

those interested in this will also find these links useful:

me, monz
"Tutorial on ancient Greek tetrachord-theory"
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/aristoxenus/tutorial.htm

John Opsopaus
"Greek Esoteric Music Theory Charts"
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/BA/PT/BA/GEM/index.html

Gabriella F. Scelta
"The History and Evolution of the Musical Symbol"
http://www.intelligirldesign.com/literature/musicsymbol.pdf

well . . . i guess i've just written my "notation" webpage!
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/dict/notation.htm

thanks, Joe! :)

-monz

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history of musical notation (was: reversed text/score accidentals)

🔗monz <joemonz@yahoo.com>

🔗dkeenanuqnetau <d.keenan@uq.net.au>

🔗jpehrson2 <jpehrson@rcn.com>