Music 101: A History of Notation (part 1)
Welcome back, dear readers. As I'm approaching my dissertation, I have some plans to revive this blog. I will continue with Music 101, so please do submit questions in comments or by email. I'm also contemplating a Work a Week series, in which each week I will dig up a new classical work or pop album and do some history on it. I've been feeling in a musical rut, and I think this would be a good way to both shake myself out of it and catalog some research for my dissertation. (Be forewarned: dissertation research is going to involve a lot of ridiculous prog rock and power metal. I suffer so you don't have to.)
Right now, I am preparing some work on a particular mass of Josquin des Prez. Before I can really dig into a music 101 post on it, though, I need to give you some technical background. So that brings us to today's topic: historical musical notation! Have no fear--you will not need to be able to read music in order to follow this post. I'm going to go deep, though. (Mainly because I need to review all of this material, but I hope you will enjoy the level of detail.) The part of this post that's most relevant to the Josquin is the final section on white mensural notation, which is in part 2, so you can skip straight there if you'd like.
Musical notation as we now know it basically cemented in the Baroque period. If you picked up a piece of music written c.1600 (the end of the Renaissance [1]), you would be able to read it without any major difficulty. It's perhaps analogous to reading Shakespeare in 2017: same language, there are just a few archaisms to navigate. But as with English--I'm just realizing the parallels between the evolution of English and music and it's blowing my mind a little (2)--jump back even one or two hundred years, and you will soon find yourself in over your head.
Early Middle Ages: Plainchant
The earliest form of musical notation in Western Europe is neumatic notation. You can see some examples of early notation and read a little about it in my post on the oldest music in the world. The Schola Cantorum was established following the reign of Pope Gregory the Great, by the end of the 7th century. The chant repertory was still being developed and consolidated over the next few centuries, but we know that there were directives to standardize the chant literature. It's during this time that we start to find evidence of notation, and these earliest notes are neumes. In short, neumes were aids for remembering the general contour of a tune. The earliest examples that we have date c.900. They are squiggles written in over words and they don't convey pitch or rhythm. Little by little, neumes are refined into a system that can convey precise pitch relations, by placing the neums on a staff. It's actually pretty fun to watch this evolution; if you flip through pictures from each successive development, you really can see the system developing right before your eyes. Take a look!
(Photos are from the Schoyen Collection, unless otherwise indicated. The Schoyen Collection has a wonderful digital catalog; if you would like more details about a particular example, look up the manuscript [MS] number in their catalog. They have thorough annotations.)
First, we have regular-ass neumes:
Next, we have heighted neumes, meaning, some are written higher than others, to indicate pitch contour:
These developed in the 10th century. Sometimes in heighted neumes, you see a line drawn (or scratched into the parchment) through the neume cloud. This line usually represents the note C or F, so it helps to establish a somewhat-but-not-really more precise pitch relationship between neumes.
In the following century, Guido d'Arezzo codified a system that became known--wait for it--as Guidonian notation. This is basically heighted neumes with a four line staff. Can you imagine that conversation?
"I've made an amazing breakthrough. It's going to change music forever."
"What is it, Guido?"
"I'm going to use the same notation we've been using, but I'm going to ADD LINES."
I kid; Guido was good people. His treatise Micrologus (c. 1025) was the most influential music theory text since Boetheius' 6th century treatise De institutione musica. His four line staff makes pitch notation in neumes precise, and it's the basis of the 5 line staff that we use today. It was quickly and widely adopted. The lines of his staff mark the notes F-A-C-E. Guido recommended that they be drawn in different colors, with red for F and yellow for C. Many scribes were kind enough to oblige, but it soon became common to mark all four lines in red or black ink.
Guidonian notation:
Guido also invented sol fege, so next time you're watching The Sound of Music and grooving to "Do-re-mi," take a moment to thank a certain 11th century monk who came from Arezzo.
His four line staff stuck--so well, in fact, that the modern liturgy is still taught in the style you see on the Cistercian manuscript to the left. In 1903, Pope Pius X adopted a book of standard chant repertory called the Liber usualis as the official chant book of the Vatican. This repertory was in development since the 11th century at the Abbey of Solesmes, but at the end of the 19th century, the Abbot edited the repertory into the Liber usualis the church now uses. It uses a slightly adapted and standardized form of neumes that we call solesmes notation.
It was smooth sailing for Guido's staff, for several centuries. During the 13th century, neumes evolved into a much clearer style of square note heads called--wait for it--square notation.
As you can see, the square notes are much clearer and easier to read at a glance. (There is a constellation of 3 diamonds at the start of each staff: this is an F clef, the ancestor of our modern bass clef.)
I've been talking a lot about notation communicating accurate pitch relationships. You might be wondering, what about rhythm? If so, you get a cookie, because that's the next big issue. It is argued that neumes communicate rhythmic durations, but there is little agreement on this. There is no treatise that standardized this practice that we can look to as our Rosetta Stone. (It's not just that no such treatise has survived; I would speculate that it never existed. Notational practices varied hugely by region.) Square notes eliminate all of the tails and swoops that may or may not indicate duration in neumes, so they communicate even less, rhythmically.
But Parisian theorists were on it! At the same time that square notes arose in France, a series of treatises putting forth rhythmic theories came out. The two big ones were De mensurabili musica and Ars cantus mensurabilis. De mensurabili musica (c.1260) codifies a set of 6 rhythmic modes that had probably been in use for decades. The rhythmic modes are rhythmic feet, much as in poetic meters. (Think of the "iambic" part of "iambic pentameter.") Notes were arranged in specific styles of ligatures (combinations of notes; drawing several notes without lifting the pen) that communicated which mode was to be used.
Rhythmic modes are distinctive feature of Notre Dame polyphony, and this example clearly shows the use of ligatures:
This system had some ambiguities and limitations that became immediately apparent, and Franco of Cologne's treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis (c. 1260) sought to reconcile some of these difficulties. Franco proposed that individual note shapes--rather than a complex system of relationships between notes that were tied to text syllabilization--could communicate rhythmic values. To put it another way, in modal notation, the shapes of notes were determined by the mode. In Franconian notation, the shape of the notes communicated the mode.
This Franconian notation is the first form of mensural notation (mensura is Latin for "measured") and it revolutionized composition. We'll dig into the can of worms that is mensural notation in part 2.
If you're not used to reading early mensural notation (the Franconian notation on the right), it might look identical to the modal notation above. They are very similar, but there are some subtle differences. This site has a great explanation of some of the differences.
If you pick up a random manuscript page and you don't know the date or source, how do you know which type of notation you're looking at? It can be challenging, as someone who doesn't specialize in this literature, but I can only say that modal notation looks weird to me. If I try to read it, it quickly becomes apparent that I'm doing it wrong. You cannot read modal notation without having memorized the various rules for interpreting which mode you're in. Franconian notation, on the other hand, is standardized and makes sense to me.
In a nutshell, if you look at a single note--not a ligature--in modal notation, you have no idea how long that note is without looking at the notes around it. It's context dependent. As such, modal notation mostly consists of ligatures. That's part of the "weird" look. Franconian notation is a good mix of single notes and ligatures, because single notes after Franco have specific value. They are clearly a longa, breve, or semi-breve. Like this:
One final small note about something you can see clearly in the Franconian example: each staff line begins with a squared C shape, indicating which staff line is the pitch C. This C clef is the antecedent of the alto and tenor clefs that are still used, but historically, it can be used on any line of the staff to designate C.
1: The term "Renaissance" is out of vogue, a fashion I'm happy to follow as a medievalist, because "Renaissance" is a loaded term that dismisses the preceding eras as ignorant and savage. The preferred term now is Early Modern, as folks seem to agree that "modernity" began circa 1500. Me, I say 1300, but no one's asking me. If you ask 20 people, you'll get 20 different answers. "Modernity" is a meaningless term out of context. In the context of music history, especially in broad histories for a lay audience, throwing the word "modern" around can quickly lead to semantic troubles. (Incidentally, Semantic Troubles is the name of my new vaporwave band.) So for the sake of minimizing confusion, I'll stick with Renaissance, which for music refers to about 1400-1600.
2: Please don't interpret this as a suggestion that music notation and English are actually related. They are not. But the simultaneous development of modern English and modern notation does serve to illustrate why the period around 1500 is now called the Early Modern period!
Right now, I am preparing some work on a particular mass of Josquin des Prez. Before I can really dig into a music 101 post on it, though, I need to give you some technical background. So that brings us to today's topic: historical musical notation! Have no fear--you will not need to be able to read music in order to follow this post. I'm going to go deep, though. (Mainly because I need to review all of this material, but I hope you will enjoy the level of detail.) The part of this post that's most relevant to the Josquin is the final section on white mensural notation, which is in part 2, so you can skip straight there if you'd like.
Musical notation as we now know it basically cemented in the Baroque period. If you picked up a piece of music written c.1600 (the end of the Renaissance [1]), you would be able to read it without any major difficulty. It's perhaps analogous to reading Shakespeare in 2017: same language, there are just a few archaisms to navigate. But as with English--I'm just realizing the parallels between the evolution of English and music and it's blowing my mind a little (2)--jump back even one or two hundred years, and you will soon find yourself in over your head.
Early Middle Ages: Plainchant
The earliest form of musical notation in Western Europe is neumatic notation. You can see some examples of early notation and read a little about it in my post on the oldest music in the world. The Schola Cantorum was established following the reign of Pope Gregory the Great, by the end of the 7th century. The chant repertory was still being developed and consolidated over the next few centuries, but we know that there were directives to standardize the chant literature. It's during this time that we start to find evidence of notation, and these earliest notes are neumes. In short, neumes were aids for remembering the general contour of a tune. The earliest examples that we have date c.900. They are squiggles written in over words and they don't convey pitch or rhythm. Little by little, neumes are refined into a system that can convey precise pitch relations, by placing the neums on a staff. It's actually pretty fun to watch this evolution; if you flip through pictures from each successive development, you really can see the system developing right before your eyes. Take a look!
(Photos are from the Schoyen Collection, unless otherwise indicated. The Schoyen Collection has a wonderful digital catalog; if you would like more details about a particular example, look up the manuscript [MS] number in their catalog. They have thorough annotations.)
First, we have regular-ass neumes:
Next, we have heighted neumes, meaning, some are written higher than others, to indicate pitch contour:
These developed in the 10th century. Sometimes in heighted neumes, you see a line drawn (or scratched into the parchment) through the neume cloud. This line usually represents the note C or F, so it helps to establish a somewhat-but-not-really more precise pitch relationship between neumes.
In the following century, Guido d'Arezzo codified a system that became known--wait for it--as Guidonian notation. This is basically heighted neumes with a four line staff. Can you imagine that conversation?
"I've made an amazing breakthrough. It's going to change music forever."
"What is it, Guido?"
"I'm going to use the same notation we've been using, but I'm going to ADD LINES."
I kid; Guido was good people. His treatise Micrologus (c. 1025) was the most influential music theory text since Boetheius' 6th century treatise De institutione musica. His four line staff makes pitch notation in neumes precise, and it's the basis of the 5 line staff that we use today. It was quickly and widely adopted. The lines of his staff mark the notes F-A-C-E. Guido recommended that they be drawn in different colors, with red for F and yellow for C. Many scribes were kind enough to oblige, but it soon became common to mark all four lines in red or black ink.
Guidonian notation:
His four line staff stuck--so well, in fact, that the modern liturgy is still taught in the style you see on the Cistercian manuscript to the left. In 1903, Pope Pius X adopted a book of standard chant repertory called the Liber usualis as the official chant book of the Vatican. This repertory was in development since the 11th century at the Abbey of Solesmes, but at the end of the 19th century, the Abbot edited the repertory into the Liber usualis the church now uses. It uses a slightly adapted and standardized form of neumes that we call solesmes notation.
 |
| Incipit from the Liber Usualis |
It was smooth sailing for Guido's staff, for several centuries. During the 13th century, neumes evolved into a much clearer style of square note heads called--wait for it--square notation.
 |
| Antiphonal, MS 003000 at Dartmouth |
I've been talking a lot about notation communicating accurate pitch relationships. You might be wondering, what about rhythm? If so, you get a cookie, because that's the next big issue. It is argued that neumes communicate rhythmic durations, but there is little agreement on this. There is no treatise that standardized this practice that we can look to as our Rosetta Stone. (It's not just that no such treatise has survived; I would speculate that it never existed. Notational practices varied hugely by region.) Square notes eliminate all of the tails and swoops that may or may not indicate duration in neumes, so they communicate even less, rhythmically.
But Parisian theorists were on it! At the same time that square notes arose in France, a series of treatises putting forth rhythmic theories came out. The two big ones were De mensurabili musica and Ars cantus mensurabilis. De mensurabili musica (c.1260) codifies a set of 6 rhythmic modes that had probably been in use for decades. The rhythmic modes are rhythmic feet, much as in poetic meters. (Think of the "iambic" part of "iambic pentameter.") Notes were arranged in specific styles of ligatures (combinations of notes; drawing several notes without lifting the pen) that communicated which mode was to be used.
Rhythmic modes are distinctive feature of Notre Dame polyphony, and this example clearly shows the use of ligatures:
 |
| Perotin; source of image unknown |
 |
| Montpellier Codex, compiled c. 1300 |
If you're not used to reading early mensural notation (the Franconian notation on the right), it might look identical to the modal notation above. They are very similar, but there are some subtle differences. This site has a great explanation of some of the differences.
If you pick up a random manuscript page and you don't know the date or source, how do you know which type of notation you're looking at? It can be challenging, as someone who doesn't specialize in this literature, but I can only say that modal notation looks weird to me. If I try to read it, it quickly becomes apparent that I'm doing it wrong. You cannot read modal notation without having memorized the various rules for interpreting which mode you're in. Franconian notation, on the other hand, is standardized and makes sense to me.
In a nutshell, if you look at a single note--not a ligature--in modal notation, you have no idea how long that note is without looking at the notes around it. It's context dependent. As such, modal notation mostly consists of ligatures. That's part of the "weird" look. Franconian notation is a good mix of single notes and ligatures, because single notes after Franco have specific value. They are clearly a longa, breve, or semi-breve. Like this:
 |
| Franconian note values |
One final small note about something you can see clearly in the Franconian example: each staff line begins with a squared C shape, indicating which staff line is the pitch C. This C clef is the antecedent of the alto and tenor clefs that are still used, but historically, it can be used on any line of the staff to designate C.
1: The term "Renaissance" is out of vogue, a fashion I'm happy to follow as a medievalist, because "Renaissance" is a loaded term that dismisses the preceding eras as ignorant and savage. The preferred term now is Early Modern, as folks seem to agree that "modernity" began circa 1500. Me, I say 1300, but no one's asking me. If you ask 20 people, you'll get 20 different answers. "Modernity" is a meaningless term out of context. In the context of music history, especially in broad histories for a lay audience, throwing the word "modern" around can quickly lead to semantic troubles. (Incidentally, Semantic Troubles is the name of my new vaporwave band.) So for the sake of minimizing confusion, I'll stick with Renaissance, which for music refers to about 1400-1600.
2: Please don't interpret this as a suggestion that music notation and English are actually related. They are not. But the simultaneous development of modern English and modern notation does serve to illustrate why the period around 1500 is now called the Early Modern period!
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