The Evolution of Musical Notation
by Sir Egil Njalsson
(March 1995)

The performance and enjoyment of music seems to be one of the things which truly separate humanity from the other animals. As far as we can tell, humans have been performing music as long as humankind has existed, yet certain periods of human history have been especially important to the development of music.

The medieval period was one of great progress musically, in which music evolved from something people just did naturally to something worthy of academic and intellectual study. This is not to imply that music was not treated seriously in the preceding centuries: in ancient Greece, Pythagoras himself (the mathematician who created the Pythagorean Theorem governing right triangles) is the one credited with inventing the progression of notes we now recognize as the major scale, and this scale was based on the notes produced when a plucked string was shortened by various fractions. Yet the medieval period, particularly in western Europe, was the time in which music really expanded in its capacity for intellectual study, because that was the time and place in which a notational system for music was finally developed.

Until this time, the only means of "recording" music was to write down the lyrics of songs. The melodies had to be passed on by word of mouth: a musician who knew the particular song would teach the melody note by note to the learner, and through practice and repetition the learner would acquire the new tune. Thus, the transmission of songs was very random, sporadic, and inefficient: in order to learn a new song, you had to track down someone who already knew it, and spend time with them, hoping that their own memory of the tune was correct.

Though music has always been performed by people from every walk of life, it was in the Holy Catholic Church that music really flourished toward the end of the first millennium A.D., because of the needs of the worshipers. In the monasteries, eight services were held each day, and each day of the calendar year was dedicated to some saint or holy feast (or several). As much as possible, the monks liked to have unique music for each of the 2500+ services held per year at their monastery.

The kind of music in question was referred to as plainsong, or chant. Among its many distinguishing features, chant was sung a cappella by monks of the Catholic church; it had no steady beat; and it had a sacred Latin text. Since each monastery was relatively isolated from the others by long journeys on foot or by horse, each local brotherhood tended to develop its own body of music. When, on church business, a monk travelled from one monastery to another, he would sometimes learn new songs from the place he visited, or might teach songs he knew to the monks he spent a short time with. This method of spreading these sacred tunes obviously left much to be desired.

With such a great demand for music, and with so much music being composed all over Europe, the field was ripe for the development of a written form of musical notation. Instead of the sporadic, word-of-mouth transmission which was taking place at that point, it was reasoned that if a notational system was developed, and if everyone learned the system, then all of the songs could be written down and sent to a central location (such as Rome), where copies could be made for everyone and distributed to all the local monasteries. Thus, by owning a single book of music a monastery could suddenly have access to, and be able to learn accurately, hundreds of songs from all over Europe; and when monks from different monasteries got together they would all know the same songs and would thus be able to worship God more fully.

Historians are not certain as to who had the original idea to come up with a form of musical notation for the reasons described above, but the credit is generally given to Pope Gregory I. (It may have been Gregory II or Gregory III.) Thus, the initial collection of written plainsong is referred to as "Gregorian Chant." (Though this term has since become used generically to describe all chant, it technically only describes the initial collection of 600 songs, which may have been collected as late as the eighth century.)

 

As you may imagine, the original attempts at a notational system did not look much like what we use today. The first development was the use of "neumes," or small squiggly marks placed above the written text. By estimating how far above the words the marks were, one could guess at how high or low the note for that word should be. By looking at the shape of the mark, one could tell whether the whole word was sung on the same note, or whether the melody went up or down within the word.

This system proved sufficient for a short while, but was soon thought to be inadequate because of its inaccuracy. Since everything was handwritten and very sketchy, it was often difficult to tell whether one note was meant to be higher or lower than another. In particular, it was impossible to tell whether one entire song was meant to be higher or lower than another song, since there was no way to determine on what pitch the song should start. Some kind of absolute reference point was needed, and this was solved by drawing a single horizontal line, and placing the neumes above or below it. This helped for a while, since many chants have a relatively small melodic range and thus tended to hover right around the line. For songs which spent most of their time well away from the line, or had a greater range, this single line proved to be insufficiently accurate, and a second line was added; then a third, and a fourth. For chant, four lines were often sufficient for the vocal range a given song would cover, and this set of lines became known as a "staff."

At the same time, the shapes of the notes were evolving, to give more information to the singer. From the initial squiggles, the notes became patterns of squares, rectangles, and parallelograms, showing the length of the note and movement up or down of notes within a word.

Note heads did not become oval until the fifteenth century. Even at that time, the church chants were not rhythmically strict, and a song might be written of simply open ovals, each representing a word or phrase. These open ovals were the standard, or "whole," notes. The distance between them was the standard unit of measurement, or a "measure." "Measure lines" were placed between them to tell the singer when to breathe.

As this flourishing system of musical notation gained wider acceptance, it was also used to mark other types of music, such as instrumental dances. For such songs, stricter rhythms were needed, as well as a set of lines which could go much higher or lower than a given human voice could perform.

To mark rhythms, the whole notes were subdivided. By putting a "stem" on the note, it became a "half" note, half as long as a whole note. By filling in the oval, it was divided in half again, becoming a "quarter" note. Further subdivisions were achieved by placing "flags" on the stems: one flag indicated an eighth note; two flags indicated a sixteenth note, and so on. Over time, the quarter note rather than the whole note became the generally accepted standard unit of measurement, but for most music the rhythms were still grouped into "measures" each of which was as long as a whole note. (Most 20th-century music still follows this pattern.)

This solved the instrumental rhythmic notational needs, but there was still the matter of the range of notes which an instrument could produce. The basic four-line staff proved to be insufficient for the wide melodic ranges of instrumental music, so the number was slowly expanded up to a maximum of seventeen. This afforded great accuracy, but was very difficult to read while you were playing. They reasoned that a smaller number of lines would work, as long as they had a way of going beyond it when necessary. The number of lines shrank to eleven, and this eleven-line staff became known as the "grand staff." (The grand staff is still in use today in piano music.) The middle line was erased for ease of reading, but small pieces of it may be drawn in if needed for reference purposes. In addition, notes which fell outside the range of the grand staff would also use small pieces of the vanished lines as needed for reference. (These small pieces of line are referred to as "leger lines.")

Thus the eleven-line staff, appearing as a set of two five-line staves with an invisible line between, became the standard. Yet for vocal works, it was usually more than was needed. Music written for men could easily get by with just the lower set of five, and women could use the upper set. Thus, if you saw just a set of five lines, you needed a marker to show you whether it was meant to be the upper or lower set. It was decided that the lower set would be marked with the letter F, and the upper set with a G. Over time, these symbols evolved into what we recognize as the bass and treble clefs.

 

Thus we see that the system of musical notation now in use evolved over many centuries to arrive at the form we use today. Yet even now we might still be teaching each other songs by word of mouth if it weren't for a pope, over a thousand years ago, looking for a more efficient way to worship God.

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