Musical notation
Musical notation is any system used to visually represent music. Systems of notation generally represent the elements of a piece of music that are considered important for its performance in the context of a given musical tradition. The process of interpreting musical notation is often referred to as reading music.
Distinct methods of notation have been invented throughout history by various cultures. Much information about ancient music notation is fragmentary. Even in the same time frames, different styles of music and different cultures use different music notation methods.
For example, classical performers most often use sheet music using staves, time signatures, key signatures, and noteheads for writing and deciphering pieces. But even so, there are far more systems than just that. For instance, in professional country music, the Nashville Number System is the main method, and for string instruments such as guitar, it is quite common for tablature to be used by players.
Musical notation uses ancient and modern symbols made upon any media such as stone, clay tablets, papyrus, parchment or manuscript paper; printed using a printing press, a computer printer or other printing or modern copying technology.
Although many ancient cultures used symbols to represent melodies and rhythms, none of them were particularly comprehensive, which has limited today's understanding of their music. The direct ancestor of the modern Western system of notation emerged in medieval Europe, in the context of the Christian Church's attempts to standardize the performance of plainsong melodies so that chants could be standardized across different areas. Notation developed further during the Renaissance and Baroque music eras. In the Classical period and the Romantic music era, notation continued to develop as the technology for musical instruments advanced. In the contemporary classical music of the 20th and 21st centuries, music notation has evolved further, with the introduction of graphical notation by some modern composers and the use, since the 1980s, of computer-based scorewriter programs for notating music. Music notation has been adapted to many kinds of music, including classical music, popular music, and traditional music.
History
Ancient Near East
The earliest form of musical notation can be found in a cuneiform tablet that was created at Nippur, in Babylonia, in about 1400 BCE. The tablet represents fragmentary instructions for performing music, showing it was composed in harmonies of thirds using a diatonic scale.A tablet from about 1250 BCE shows a more developed form of notation. Although the interpretation of the notation system is still controversial, it is clear that the notation indicates the names of strings on a lyre, the tuning of which is described in other tablets. Research indicates these notations had dual purposes for liturgical and secular musical pieces since music was essential in both religious ceremonies and courtly activities. Although they are fragmentary, these tablets represent the earliest notated melodies found anywhere in the world.
File:Delphichymn.jpg|thumb|A photograph of the original stone at Delphi containing the second of the two Delphic Hymns to Apollo. The music notation is the line of occasional symbols above the main, uninterrupted line of Greek lettering.
Ancient Greece
musical notation was in use from at least the 6th century BCE until approximately the 4th century CE; only few complete compositions and around 40 fragmentary pieces using this notation survive.The notation for sung music consists of letter symbols for the pitches, placed above text syllables. Rhythm is indicated in a rudimentary way only, with long and short symbols. The Seikilos epitaph has been variously dated between the 2nd century BCE to the 2nd century CE.
Three hymns by Mesomedes of Crete exist in manuscript. The Delphic Hymns, dated to the 2nd century BCE also use this notation, but they are not completely preserved.
Ancient Greek notation appears to have fallen out of use around the time of the decline of the Western Roman Empire.
Byzantine Empire
music once included music for court ceremonies, but has only survived as vocal church music within various Orthodox traditions of monodic chant written down in Byzantine round notation.Since the 6th century, Greek theoretical categories played a key role in the understanding and transmission of Byzantine music, The tradition of Damascus, especially, had a strong impact on the pre-Islamic Near East comparable to that of Persian music. The earliest evidence are papyrus fragments of Greek tropologia. These fragments present the hymn text following a modal signature or key.
Unlike Western notation, Byzantine neumes used since the 10th century were always related to modal steps in relation to such a clef or modal key. Originally this key or the incipit of a common melody was enough to indicate a certain melodic model given within the echos. Next to ekphonetic notation, only used in lectionaries to indicate formulas used during scriptural lessons, melodic notation developed not earlier than between the 9th and the 10th century, when a theta, oxeia or diple were written under a certain syllable of the text whenever a longer melisma was expected. This primitive form was called "theta" or "diple notation".
The evolution of this notation can be observed in Greek monastic chant books like those of the sticherarion and the heirmologion. Chartres notation was used on Mount Athos and Constantinople, and Coislin notation was used within the patriarchates of Jerusalem and Alexandria, while another gestic notation was originally used for the asmatikon and kontakarion of the Constantinopolitan cathedral rite. The earliest books which have survived, are "kondakars" in Slavonic translation which already show a notation system known as Kondakarian notation. Like the Greek alphabet, notational signs are ordered left to right. The question of rhythm was entirely based on cheironomia. These great signs indicated well-known melodic phrases given by gestures of the choirleaders of the cathedral rite. They existed once as part of an oral tradition, developed into Kondakarian notation and were integrated, during the 13th century, into Byzantine round notation as a kind of universal notation system.
Today, the main difference between Western and Eastern neumes is that Eastern notation symbols are "differential" rather than absolute, i.e., they indicate pitch steps, and the musicians must deduce the specific intervals based on the musical context and their current pitch. These step symbols themselves, or better "phonic neumes", resemble brush strokes and are colloquially called gántzoi in modern Greek.
Notes as pitch classes or modal keys are represented in written form only between these neumes. In modern notation they simply serve as optional reminders, with modal and tempo directions added when necessary. In Papadic notation medial signatures usually meant a temporary change into another echos.
The so-called "great signs" were once related to cheironomic signs; according to modern interpretations they are understood as embellishments and microtonal attractions, both essential in Byzantine chant.
Since Chrysanthos of Madytos there are seven standard note names used for "solfège" pá, vú, ghá, dhi, ké, zō, nē, while the older practice still used the four enechemata or intonation formulas of the four echoi given by the modal signatures, the authentic or kyrioi in ascending direction, and the plagal or plagioi in descending direction. With exception of vú and zō, they do roughly correspond to Western solmization syllables as re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do. Byzantine music uses the eight natural, non-tempered scales whose elements were identified by Ēkhoi, "sounds", exclusively, and therefore the absolute pitch of each note may slightly vary each time, depending on the particular Ēkhos used. Byzantine notation is still used in many Orthodox Churches. Sometimes cantors also use transcriptions into Western or Kievan staff notation while adding non-notatable embellishment material from memory and "sliding" into the natural scales from experience. However, even in modern neume editions since the reform of Chrysanthos, many details rely on oral tradition passed down by traditional masters.
13th-century Near East
In 1252, Safi al-Din al-Urmawi developed a form of musical notation where rhythms were represented by geometric shapes. Many subsequent scholars of rhythm have sought to develop graphical geometrical notations. For example, a similar geometric system was published in 1987 by Kjell Gustafson, whose method represents a rhythm as a two-dimensional graph. Rhythmic notation during its early stages developed Eastern musical traditions while simultaneously establishing concepts that Western music used to build its notation systems later on.Early Europe
The scholar and music theorist Isidore of Seville, while writing in the early 7th century, wrote 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. 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.File:EarlyMusicNotation.JPG|thumb|Early music notation in Latin, clearly marking neumes
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 the rhythm in chant to six different repeating patterns. This was a flaw seen by German music theorist Franco of Cologne and summarised as part of his treatise Ars Cantus Mensurabilis. 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 became commonplace by the end of the 17th century.
The founder of what is now considered the standard music staff was Guido d'Arezzo, an Italian Benedictine monk who lived from about 991 until after 1033. He taught the use of solmization syllables based on a hymn to Saint John the Baptist, which begins Ut queant laxis and was written by the Lombard historian Paul the Deacon. The first stanza is:
- Ut queant laxis
- resonare fibris
- Mira gestorum
- famuli tuorum,
- Solve polluti
- labii reatum,
- S'ancte Iohannes.
Christian monks developed the first forms of modern European musical notation in order to standardize liturgy throughout the worldwide Church, and an enormous body of religious music has been composed for it through the ages. This led directly to the emergence and development of European classical music, and its many derivatives. The Baroque style, which encompassed music, art, and architecture, was particularly encouraged by the post-Reformation Catholic Church as such forms offered a means of religious expression that was stirring and emotional, intended to stimulate religious fervor.