INTABULATION. - A system, no longer in use, of instrumental musical notation.
When, in the second half of the 15th century, polyphonic choral music (in which the art of music had reached high expressive and technical possibilities) began to be transcribed for instruments that (like the organ) can perform several parts simultaneously, it became necessary to devise a system of notation that would clearly indicate the melodic independence and rhythmic synchronism of the various parts gathered on the keyboard. This system, called precisely tablature, is essentially the ancestor of our scores, in that for the first time it presented to the performer's eye the various parts arranged in vertical columns with bar lines delimiting groups of measures.
Tablatures are classified according to the type of instrument (organ tablature, harpsichord tablature, lute tablature, guitar tablature) and taking into account the different countries (Italian, French, German, Spanish tablature) and the particular systems of notation (alphabetic, musical, cipher, mixed). In German tablatures for organ and for harpsichord, alphabetic notation was preferred: from A to G for the 1st octave, from a to g for the 2nd, from ā to g for the 3rd and from ā to g for the 4th octave (H stands for B). For chromatic alteration and for rhythmic values there were special signs (dashes and tails variously arranged and placed). Italian tablatures for the organ and for the harpsichord are laid out on two staves, of which the lower often has a greater number of lines (e.g., 7). Two clefs on the same staff facilitate reading.
Cipher notation was widely used by Spanish masters (both for keyboard instruments and for plucked-string instruments). In it the numbers from 1 to 15 correspond to a range of two octaves. 1=LA; ninth first = B flat; ninth second = B natural. To these are added signs derived from common measured notation (the cipher system introduced in France by a confrere of Fr. Mersenne had continuators). Entirely different is the concept underlying notation for lute or for guitar. Here the intention was to indicate not the note, but the point at which the finger presses on the string, that is, the fret. The lines of the staff indicate the strings, and are therefore as many as the strings of the instrument itself. The divergence is complete between the Italian system and the French one: in the latter the upper line of the staff corresponds to the highest string; in the Italian system, on the other hand, the lower line corresponds to it. The French apply letters to the staff, the Italians numbers. The Germans suppress the staff while nevertheless maintaining alphabetic notation in an ideal alignment. Among the earliest theorists who treat of tablatures, K. Paumann is famous with his Fundamentum arginizandi (1452; ed. Berlin 1925).
Tablatures have transmitted and preserved much music of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. Lute tablatures in particular are useful not only for knowledge of the technique of the instrument, but also because they resolve doubtful points in those polyphonic-choral works that were transcribed into the tablatures themselves.
The master-singers, in the 15th and 16th centuries, called Tablatur the body of rules for setting a poetic text to music.
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