The Daily Parker

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N is for Notation

Blogging A to ZToday's Blogging A-to-Z challenge post will, like yesterday's, take us back in time.

Almost every day I've shown samples of music using modern notation. Any contemporary musician should have no trouble reading them.

Almost a thousand years ago, in 1025, the monk Guido d'Arezzo decided to record music on paper in a way that would enable people to read it even if they'd never encountered it before. He used blocks on lines with stems indicating how the notes were connected, and it looked like this:

The innovation here is that the note heads convey absolute pitch, and the stems convey timing, just as they do today. Someone who has never seen this before could (if they understood the language) produce the music intended by the composer.

During the early 17th century, as instrumental music came to dominate the scene, musical notation became much more complex. By the 1620s and 1630s, scores looked almost the same as they do today.

Specialized music uses specialized notation schemes, however. And non-Western music, which may use entirely different tonalities, sometimes has entirely different ways of notation.

Comments (1) -

  • Jz

    4/17/2019 10:08:59 PM +00:00 |

    This is one of those things that seems so obvious to us now but just imagine the kind of thinking it took to come up with that...
    Amazing stuff.

    Happy A-Z'ing

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