The earliest surviving attempts to notate music date from the 10th century, and became increasingly precise and complex over the following millennium. Discover the visual beauty of music manuscripts through the ages, and how they help musicians interpret composers’ intentions.
Writing the language of music
Words by Eva Moreda Rodríguez
- In pictures
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Early European examples of music notation might appear disappointingly vague compared with the sheet music we are used to today. The stave (the five lines and four spaces music is written on) didn’t become the norm until the 11th century, whereas systems to notate rhythm in a precise manner appeared in the 13th century. The earlier manuscripts instead used so-called ‘neumes’. Manuscripts using neumatic notation were not intended to be read out of context: instead they were used as an aide-memoire by monks and nuns performing the rich and complex plainsong repertoire, mostly from memory. From the sinuous shapes they would have been able to tell whether the melody should go up or down – but also whether certain expressive effects or ornaments were needed to convey the meaning of the text. However, it would have been impossible for anyone unfamiliar with the music to perform it using the notation alone.
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The stave became the norm in the 11th century, thanks largely to the Italian music theorist Guido d’Arezzo; this solved the problem of notating pitch. But what about rhythm? Before different note shapes came to indicate specific time values, it was from the groupings of notes that performers would know which rhythm should be applied to a passage, as is the case here. And so the needs and wishes of composers and performers pushed notation to develop in certain directions and not in others: rhythm became more precise, for example, but the expressive nuances conveyed by the neumes were lost. At the same time, developments in notation opened up new possibilities for interpretation by musicians, which might not have been intended by composers.
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The invention of the printing press likely put many talented scribes out of a job, but it enabled music to circulate well beyond what oral transmission allowed. As trade routes developed within Europe and beyond, professional musicians and avid amateurs came to know a range of repertoire from near and far, engraved in the unmistakeable diamond-shaped notes that Ottaviano dei Petrucci pioneered in Venice in 1501. Printed music also helped to standardise notation – in fact, in the example above, the stave, note values, time signature and accidentals are the same as those we are familiar with today. Bar lines, on the other hand, didn’t become standard until the 17th century, while dynamic markings were not used systematically until the late 18th century.
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Until the advent of commercial recordings in the early 20th century, the sheet-music market remained a thriving one, allowing a range of audiences to get acquainted with the latest hits of the day. These songs – such as political, war, patriotic, satirical and drinking songs – often had the potential to bring individuals and communities together (or set them apart).
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The invention of music notation also brought us an ever-familiar trope from the realm of classical music: that of the composer slaving away over their manuscripts, composing and re-composing until the masterpiece is complete. Today, manuscripts and sketches by prominent composers can fetch hundreds of thousands at auction, and their rediscovery (especially if unearthed from a dusty attic) often makes newspaper headlines. This image shows the innovative style of 20th-century French composer Lili Boulanger, who died aged only 24, composing a number of complex and celebrated works in her short life.
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The history of Western music shows that developments in notation typically open up some doors while at the same time closing others. Medieval monks or nuns probably didn’t enjoy the luxury of being able to read a score at first sight without having already heard the chant; at the same time, though, we do not have their ability to memorise many melodies that they were able to retrieve by looking at the neumes. Examples from elsewhere in the world reveal that not all musical cultures developed along the same lines. Musical scores in Tibetan Buddhism, which this image shows, display some similarities to the practices of medieval monastic communities. Novices learned the long trumpet repertoire from a copy of music notation that was then destroyed, as they were expected to play in the ceremonies from memory. Only the original of the notation was kept in the monastery in the long term.
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In Armenia, a form of stave-less notation, the khaz neumes, was used to write down liturgical music and folk song up to the 19th century. Neume shapes not only gave information about pitch and rhythm, but also about expression and colour – crucial elements of the performance which, in the West, have typically been indicated, if at all, with added text, often in Italian.
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Even in Europe, other forms of notation were always used alongside the conventional five-line stave. Plucked string instruments, such as the lute, guitar, vihuela (a Spanish instrument shaped like a guitar) and others, predominantly used tablatures. Here, each line of the stave represents one string of the instrument, and letters or numbers are added to indicate on which frets to place fingers: notation thus becomes less an abstract representation.
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Richly-decorated medieval manuscripts and Tibetan musical scores remind us that notation is not simply a practical aide: it can be immensely pleasurable to look at, and that visual enjoyment can definitely make its way into the performance. From the 1950s, some composers have focused on the visual potential of notation through graphic scores that sometimes open up more questions than they answer: are they a set of instructions, as tablatures were? A more-or-less decipherable representation of sound? Or simply a visual inspiration to performers?
Addendum:exitum, Alin Gherman. Source: Archive.org.
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But, contrary to popular opinion, not all contemporary composers have completely abandoned traditional notation: many choose to use it as it is, others to expand it, enhance it or use it in combination with graphics or written texts. Their scores sometimes remind us that there is nothing inevitable in the way notation developed, and that paths that were seemingly closed centuries ago might open again under new forms.
About the author
Eva Moreda Rodríguez
Dr Eva Moreda Rodríguez is a musicologist at the University of Glasgow specialising in the cultural and political history of Spanish music from the 19th and 20th centuries. She is also a Galician-language novelist, and her latest novel has been translated into English as ‘Home is like a different time’. She runs the Twitter account @NotationIsGreat.