MUSICAL PALEOGRAPHY. - It is the science of ancient notations, of the systems used to translate music into the visual field. In the broadest sense, its subject is therefore the reading of ancient musical texts, their comprehension and, consequently, their restitution in the auditory field. In the more precise sense, it has been limited to the first two objects; and today there is a tendency to restrict musical paleography to the study of scripts alone, with their forms, their history, their geographical distribution, while the musical interpretation of the writings would become a distinct science, called musical diplomatics.
Musical paleography is a relatively recent science. The 17th-18th centuries saw in it only a curiosity. Nevertheless, the names of Pretorius, Jumilhac, Gerbert may be noted, to whom Villoteau is added at the beginning of the 19th century. A few years later this science made great progress with Lambillotte, Coussemaker, Danjou, Nisard, La Fage, Fétis and others, who are true pioneers in the field of Gregorian chant. Soon the domain of musical paleography would expand: interest would be taken in the chants of antiquity as well as in the chants of the various peoples of the universe. At the same time the liturgical movement intensified research on the music of the different rites of East and West; but the chant of the Latin Church is currently the best known. We shall limit ourselves here to what concerns it. Let us say meanwhile that the study of Byzantine musical paleography is less advanced, whether it concerns paleo-Byzantine (9th-11th centuries) or the late notation.
After the publication of the Mélodies grégoriennes de dom J. Pothier (Tournai 1880), two great collections attest the interest given to musical paleography: one is the work of the Plainsong and medieval musical Society, which follows the Oxford Society for the study of plainsong; the other is entitled Paléographie musicale. Les principaux manuscrits... par les Bénédictins de Solesmes, sous la direction de dom Mocquereau (Solesmes 1889 ff.; 1st series 15 vols., 2nd series 2 vols.). In German, the works of Riemann, Fleischer, Wagner, Wolf are remembered. At present research and monographs have multiplied; some names deserve to be cited among many others, such as Bannister, Ferretti, Mocquereau.
1. The neumes
The signs used in the notation of the chants of the Church, Latin or Greek, have received the name of neumes, which means signs or breaths, according to the etymology adopted. With modern notes they therefore enter into the system of musical writing called "diastematic" as opposed to the "phonetic" system. This uses letters or numbers to indicate intervals or simply melodic pitch; used by the ancient Greeks, the Hindus and the Chinese, it was exalted, following in the footsteps of J.-J. Rousseau, by Paris, then by Galin and Chevré in France and by "Tonic fa-sol" in England. It is pointed out that, if the name of phonetic notation may pass, that of diastematic notation could not be admitted as musicologists use it: it is equivocal and inexact. It would be better to speak of semeiography to designate the conventional signs representative of music and to reserve the word diastemacy for a more precise use, as we shall see below.
Neumes are constituted by the two accents, acute and grave, and by their combinations. But other signs intervene equally in neumatic semeiography, so that one must distinguish simple neumes and special neumes. Simple neumes are in turn divided into original neumes and derived neumes. There are three original simple neumes, or signs. The virga is an ascending accent from left to right. The grave accent descends from left to right and has no particular name. Its length, much shorter than the virga, is often reduced to a point, so that it is not always easy to distinguish it from the 3rd original neume, the punctum. This is, as its name says, a simple point, but it can lengthen to become a horizontal stroke.
Derived neumes combine these three elements. It suffices to give the summary nomenclature: it is easily understood. The pes or podatus is formed by the grave accent + acute accent; the clivis by the acute accent + grave accent. Pes and clivis are the neumes of 2 notes. In the neumes of 3 notes the combination can be made according to two types of figures, in a triangle or in a line. In a triangle one will distinguish the torculus (grave-acute-grave) and the porrectus (acute-grave-acute) according to the relative position of the sounds; in a line, the scandicus and the climacus, according to whether the melody rises or falls. Since the possible combinations are still more diverse, there will be resupine neumes, which end with an acute sound, flexed neumes, which end with the grave, subpunctis neumes, which are followed by several points placed one below the other. There exist many other combinations whose complexity has received no name, except sometimes on the part of more or less fanciful theorists; it is simpler to indicate them with the generic name of chains of neumes.
Special neumes use the signs we have described, but juxtapose them (bivirga, trivirga, bipunctum) or add other signs to them.
The apostropha and its derivatives constitute the group of strophic neumes which, as the name says, use a sign similar to the apostrophe of literary texts. There are then the undulating neumes and those that use a sign, the oriscus, whose form varies appreciably from one region to another and even within the same manuscript, according to the musical context or the intentions of the notator. The oriscus can be isolated, but more often it enters into combination, whether at the beginning of a neume (pes quassus) or at the end (franculus, pes stratus) or in the middle (salicus); followed by a point, it forms the pressus. A last category comprises the neumes that cannot enter into the preceding classification; the trigon, formed of three points arranged in a triangle, and the quilisma, a kind of jagged mark placed at the base of a virga, or a hook applied at its top according to the scripts. We have thus far described the normal forms of the neumes: almost all can be appreciably modified by a final curl to express a sound generally susceptible of graphic nuances, which make one distinguish round, square, disjunct, epismatic forms. The first are easily understood, the last consists in the addition of a stroke, horizontal or vertical, to the neume. Let us add that certain scripts use intermediate curls which, in such cases, are anything but a simple graphic ligature.
To be complete, we must still cite several signs added to the neumes: abbreviations, divisions, repetitions, to which are added the significative letters.
2. Origin of the neumes
Gregorian neumes constitute a quite coherent system of notation that reveals itself abruptly, in the manuscript tradition, toward the end of the 9th century. Before the 9th century one finds no manuscripts notated with neumes and not even neumes written at first hand: this is the conclusion reached by an eminent specialist such as E. A. Lowe, after having established the Corpus of the Codices Latini antiquiores (so far 5 vols., Oxford 1934-50). The system of notation will therefore be was elaborated one or two generations before our oldest manuscripts. Although the place of origin of the neumes cannot yet be precisely determined, it should undoubtedly be sought between the Seine and the Rhine, without excluding the influence of the Anglo-Saxon milieu and, even less, the exchanges between scriptorium and scriptorium. Without taking up here the theories proposed to explain the origin of the neumes, it will be prudent to adhere to the following points. The inventors of the neumes elaborated a notation whose starting point lies in the grammatical accents; they also made use of ecphonetic signs and prosodic signs; they could have known both through manuscripts, principally through the treatises of the grammarians, and perhaps through certain books intended for public reading.
While preserving for the acute and grave accents their primitive meaning, they on the contrary gave a new meaning to the other signs. At the basis of the system lies the intention of translating a melody by means of gesture and of fixing the gesture by means of the graphic sign. Such appears, in its broad outlines, the process of elaboration of the neumatic systems, whether it be a question of the Visigothic notation of Spain, or of the Gregorian notation of the Frankish countries, or of the Byzantine one. One may moreover think that the Visigothic is somewhat earlier than the Gregorian and contributed to its formation. These explanations concern the neumatic notation based on the accent and called, for this reason, that of the neume-accents. There exists, parallel to it, another notation, that of the neume-points, which gives preponderance to the points and groups of points over the accents. It has sometimes been thought that this is more ancient, but one must admit that its testimonies are, on the contrary, more recent.
3. The regional notations
For the various regional schools, their geographical diffusion and the examples of the neumatic notation of the schools of St. Gall, Metz, Chartres and Nonantola: v. CANTO. Examples of Mozarabic notation are found in the entry MOZARABICA LITURGIA, vol. VIII, pl. 100.
4. The problem of melodic pitch
The neume-accents indicate pitch in a relative and imprecise manner; they are written without a staff, "in open field."
The neume-points are more indicative as regards pitch. Moreover, they were soon written at regular intervals: they are then diastematic. And not much time passed before lines were drawn to carry the neumes. The future was reserved for this procedure and not for the various attempts at phonetic notations made by the theorists of the 11th century. To satisfy every requirement it was in fact enough to specify the position of the semitone. This is what Guido d'Arezzo (v.) accomplished, coloring the line of fa in red and that of do in yellow. At the same time, the habit was adopted of indicating the melodic letter corresponding to these lines, and also to the other lines: from this usage derive the modern clefs.
Written on the staff, generally of four lines, with letters at the clef, the neumes changed appreciably in appearance, especially in the notations in which the accents had to be brought back to precise intervals, with breakings to mark the exact pitch: the French notation became successively a notation of bound points, of small squares, of large squares. The square notation, on the other hand, replaced the others or modified them in its own image, while the German Gothic notation took on this appearance of hammered nails that has given it the name of nail notation. The square notation, with its stems, after having given rise to the modern notations of figured music and of polyphony (v. below), has been practiced anew by the present-day books of Gregorian chant, which moreover return progressively to ancient forms of neumes, which alone succeed in expressing certain nuances.
5. The interpretation of the neumes
All paleographers are agreed in recognizing in the neumes a richness of expression that modern notations do not possess. But one must know how to understand them: such understanding is the object of a science that has every interest in distinguishing itself from paleography properly so called. By analogy with the other disciplines, it has been possible to call it a musical diplomatics. Here only a few essential principles of it will be recalled.
If every melody is a succession of sounds logically organized and offering a meaning to the ear and to the intelligence, if, on the other hand, the neume, like every notation, is the graphic representation of a melody, it follows necessarily that the neume carries a meaning at once rhythmic, melodic and expressive. This meaning is known through the study of the handwriting and its particularities (paleography), through the comparison of the manuscripts with one another (comparative paleography), through the statistics of cases, all of it placed in correlation with the musical phenomena. It is fitting, on the other hand, to distinguish the neume in itself and the neume modified either in its constitution or by additions.
The rhythmic meaning of the neume is the one that presents itself first, especially for the neume-accents. A single and isolated neumatic sign has without doubt no rhythmic value in itself: it takes it from the literary text (syllabic chant) or from the musical context (melisma). But every neumatic sign that comprises at least two elements constitutes the initial cell of the rhythmic synthesis.
The melodic meaning is imperfect in the neume-accents, perfect in the diastematic notations or on lines. In themselves the neume-accents already give some indications, of which the simplest is the superiority of the virga over the punctum. One observes likewise that certain notators use particularities of handwriting to mark the semitone. They also make use of letters, such as the aequaliter (e), the sursum (s), to bring a supplementary melodic indication.
The expressive meaning results first of all from the handwriting: one may think of the diversity of the pes in the St. Gall notation (5 forms for each first element) or of the scandicus of Benevento (8 forms in one and the same manuscript). It can be modified furthermore by an added element, episema or significant letter. Finally the style of the notator sometimes translates the nuances of the voice through the very gait of the stroke.
These brief indications relative to "musical diplomatics" can only barely reveal all the richness of meaning of the neumatic notations. Despite the imperfections, perceptible especially to the musician of today, but much less troubling to the musician of other times, these notations constitute the adequate translation of a perfect monody. Their evolution allows one to follow at a glance this radical change of musical taste, which passes between the 9th century and the 16th century from the purity of a melodic line to the harmonic richness of polyphony.
Bibliography8 works
Giacomo Hourlier
POLYPHONIC MUSICAL PALEOGRAPHY
Polyphonic notation originates from the figures of square choral notation, with a continuity that will appear even more evident when observing the groups of notes depicted with a single sign, that is, from the "ligatures," which graphically reproduce the corresponding Gregorian neumes. This notation, insofar as it is based on the simultaneity of 2 or more sounds in the practice of note-against-note encounters, which was not yet harmony in the modern sense, but a well-combined concurrence of multiple melodic lines, required from its very emergence, as a necessary condition of life, measure — that is, an exact criterion by which to determine the duration of individual sounds and of the silences interposed between them, so as to guarantee the synchronicity of the consonances.
The period of transition between black square notation (which remains unchanged for liturgical books, in Gregorian chant, down to our own day) and black mensural notation occurred between the end of the 12th century and the middle of the 13th (c. 1175-1250), in which the notation that would persist for two centuries became stabilized, later being modified into white mensural notation (1450-1600), and which would finally become, with further new modifications, that now in use throughout the world.
Current notation has been adopted both for instruments and for voices, and this came about after the 17th century, whereas previously voices and instruments often had different notations, as, for example, in ancient Greece, which used two distinct notations for the one and the other, both alphabetic. For instruments, in particular, special notations were employed from the 14th to the 18th century for keyboard instruments (organ, harpsichord), string instruments (lute, guitar, etc.) with different characters which, according to nationality (German, Spanish, Italian, French), comprised, variously combined, letters, numerals and figures, and were called "tablatures."
Of the ancient alphabetic notations, nothing remains in the current one but the "clefs" of do, fa, sol, signs derived from letters of the alphabet corresponding to the musical notes placed at the beginning of each staff to indicate that, on the five-line staff, all the notes found on the line occupied by this conventional sign correspond to the note to which that sign was anciently attributed when it was still an alphabetic letter. Even the musical staff, today fixed at five lines (the pentagram), did not come into being in a single moment, but, as neumatic diastematic notation evolved toward criteria of more exact determination of intervals, lines began to be used around the 9th century on which to place the relevant note. These lines were at first incised with the point of a stylus, and then traced in colored ink (red for fa and yellow for do), lines that from 1 came to 4 (the tetragram, which remained in use for Gregorian chant), to 5 (our current pentagram) and even to 10 lines. Theoretical sources for the history of the musical staff are the Musica enchiridis (9th century) and, in particular, the Regulae de ignoto cantu of Guido d'Arezzo (v.). The development of square notation in the polyphonic field soon came to be identified with the development of mensural notation, since the necessity of establishing different durational values for the various parts (vocal or instrumental) required the creation of new figures: these were at first (around 1225) the longa and the brevis, originating respectively from the virga and the punctum; then, around 1250, the other 2 figures were added: the maxima or duplex longa and the semibrevis, derived from a doubling of the longa and a halving of the brevis.
With these albeit limited figurative elements, the first polyphonic forms of the Ars antiqua (v.) were constructed, such as: a) the conductus, the monophonic chants and the organa dupla of Leoninus (v.); b) the organa tripla and quadrupla and the clausulae of Perotinus (v.). As regards rhythm, after the School of St-Martial of Limoges (c. 1100-50), which from the intense production of sequences and tropes (10th and 11th centuries) had passed to the first flowering of the organum in its pre-mensural phase, the School of Notre-Dame (c. 1175-1250) had, in the two aforementioned periods, intersecting and successive, a maturation which, with regard to rhythm organized according to the 6 rhythmic modes (with names going back to ancient Greece, but restored with a different understanding by the theorist Walter Odington in c. 1290), took shape in the second (Perotinian) epoch, while in the first (Leoninian) the modal interpretation is doubtful and still controversial. To the expansion of the figurative repertoire brought about by the introduction of the longa and the brevis corresponds the flowering of the motetus with its various vocal parts (v. the manuscript of Montpellier Fac. de Médecine H. 196, of Bamberg, Ed. IV 6, etc.) and is accompanied by an evolution of rhythm which, around the middle of the 13th century, begins to make itself independent of the modal meter used until then and, especially through the work of Franco of Cologne (v.), of Petrus de Cruce, of Walter Odington (v.), of Robert de Handlo and others, the values of the ligatures, notes and rests were fixed, along with the binary and ternary subdivision of the brevis which, while ternary rhythm had prevailed until that moment, called perfect in analogy to the perfection of the Most Holy Trinity, had always been divided only into three semibreves.
With the 14th century, the figures of the minima and the semiminima come to be added to the preceding figures, and one has the complete picture of 5 figures, which could be of ternary (perfect) or binary (imperfect) value; the different interpretation that had to be given to the notes was indicated at the beginning of the staff by conventional signs (a square containing three little lines to indicate perfect mode and two for the imperfect one; or a circle to indicate perfect time and a semicircle for the imperfect one), but also, without resorting to special signs, by the red color (color) which, alternating with black in the filling of the notes in ternary time, conferred imperfection upon them, that is, automatically, binary value. If red ink was lacking, the copyist left such notes white, that is, empty, achieving the same purpose (notes albae, dealbatae, cavatae).
The particularities of the new notation are illustrated with clarity and richness of detail by the French theorist Philippe de Vitry (in Coussemaker, Scriptores, cited in the bibliography, III, 33), but they are already masterfully outlined in the Pomerium of Marchetto da Padova, which marks an important turning point in the development of that Italian notation which Prosodocimo de Beldenandis, also a Paduan, would recapitulate in his Tractatus pratice cantus mensurabilis ad modum Italicorum, written at the beginning of the 15th century (Montagnana 1412).
After rhythm he studies the figures that conform to it; these, around 1400, are 6: the maxima or duplex longa, the longa, the brevis, the semibrevis, the minima and the semiminima.
The rhythmic divisions of values, which find one of their first systematic treatments in the work of Prosodocimo, amount to three: modus, tempus and prolatio.
The modus regulates the relationships between the maxima and the longa (modus maior, or modus maximarum), as well as between the longa and the brevis (modus minor, or modus longarum, the modus par excellence in the Ars nova); the tempus regulates those between the breve and the semibreve, and the prolatio those between the semibreve and the minima, which, being the last value added, was at that time indivisible.
Mode, time and prolation could, in turn, be perfect or imperfect: in the first case the relationship maxima-longa (modus major), longa-brevis (modus minor), breve-semibreve (tempus) or semibreve-minim (prolatio) was from 1 to 3 (the ternary, that is perfect, figure, from the perfection of the Most Holy Trinity, was equivalent to 3 lower figures); in the second case it was from 1 to 2 (the figure taken as the unit of measure was divided into 2 immediately lower figures). The punctus of mensural notation had 3 principal uses and names: punctus additionis or augmentationis, punctus divisionis and punctus perfectionis; the first (which has remained in modern notation) was used only in imperfect time and, placed after a note (binary, that is imperfect), added to it a value corresponding to half the value of the note itself; the second, used only in perfect time and perfect prolation, was equivalent to a bar line, in that it isolated a group or a note from the other notes so that they would not influence one another.
The third, to which the punctus imperfectionis, alterationis, syncopationis, etc. can be assimilated, was still a punctus divisionis, but one that perfected or imperfected the notes after which it was placed: it was, that is, a punctus divisionis that conferred a particular character on the values that were placed under its direct influence. The ever greater diffusion acquired by binary rhythm, which by then had been placed alongside ternary rhythm (a legacy of the Ars antiqua of the 13th century) on equal terms, became officially established in the early years of the 1300s with the Ars nova, which brought the multiplication of rhythms (from the simplest to the most complex) to an extraordinary richness, demanded by the forms themselves, predominantly secular and often composed for dance (rondeau, virelai, ballade in France, madrigal, ballata, caccia in Italy).
After the representative personalities of Philippe de Vitry for France and Marchetto da Padova for Italy, who impressed particular characteristics on musical notation, contributing to the formation and development of French and Italian notations, one arrives, after 1350, at a notation that unites in itself peculiarities of both systems and goes under the name of mixed notation: a period of transition and of tendencies toward complications and mannerisms that was accentuated toward the end of the 14th century, only to decline toward a process of clarification that occurred in the first half of the 15th century and culminated in the establishment of white mensural notation, with which, between 1450 and 1600, Flemish, French and Italian masters produced the masterpieces of sacred polyphonic art. This writing comprises 8 signs with their respective rests and an entire code of rules of its own, both for the exact interpretation of ligatures and for the reciprocal relationships between the simplices (notes not tied to one another). A first phase of development of ligatures runs from the late 12th century to the middle of the 13th century with Franco of Cologne, whose rules remained unchanged until the 15th century, and a second phase links up with the development of white notation after 1450. Ligatures developed from the figures, or neumatic groups podatus, clivis, torculus, porrectus, and were divided into descending or ascending ligatures according to their origin (descending those derived from the podatus, and ascending those derived from the clivis). According to the number of notes of which it was composed, a ligature was called binary, ternary, quaternary, etc., and from the conformation of the first or the last note it was defined as "cum" or "sine proprietate", "cum" or "sine perfectione" or "cum opposita proprietate". For the resolution of ligatures there are special rules to be applied to the nota initialis or finalis and to the "middle" notes enclosed between them (which are generally to be interpreted as "breves"). After 1600, as the figures of greater value were gradually discarded, such as the maxima, the longa and the brevis, the repertory of graphic symbols, based, as its greatest unit of measure, on the semibreve, was further enriched with other smaller values together with their relative rests; the divisions implicit in every note are by then only binary, even in ternary time, and therefore, except for the figure of the triplet, which is a memory of the fifteenth-century proportio sesquialtera or of the proportio hemiolia, in which every group of three notes stood against two of the same kind, every value is always decomposable into, or equivalent to, other lower values in even number. An important innovation already outlined with sporadic hints in the organ tablatures of the 15th century (cf. Fundamentum organisandi by K. Paumann, 1452) and already generalized in the instrumental music of the 1500s (keyboard instruments, lute, etc.), the bar line became definitively established in instrumental and vocal notation from the 17th century onward, even if the character it assumed was not always the same. Even in the 16th century, however, the score, which already, though rarely, gathered together in drafts of polyphonic vocal music, intended for an overall glance, the melodies that were customarily written in separate fascicles for the individual voice parts, carried clear barrings marked by a line at the end of each measure. Both in vocal and in instrumental music there was in the 18th century a flourishing of virtuosic ornaments that found its graphic expression in embellishments (v.), and signs of interpretation for dynamic, qualitative or quantitative expression, intensity of a particular inflection, speed, rhythmic or mechanical devices or licenses, all aimed at enriching expressive possibilities and at attenuating the dangers of a too personal interpretive realization.
A particular kind of musical notation for instruments is given (in the 15th-17th centuries and beyond) by tablature, which assumes forms and aspects that differ according to the country in which it arose and developed. Although this kind of writing was used on a large scale also for other instruments (for the organ and keyboard instruments: German and Spanish tablatures, 14th-18th centuries; for guitar, violin, flute, etc., 17th century), its principal and most widespread use was for the lute, an art instrument that became generalized in Europe, perhaps starting from Spain, where its Arab origin had brought it, from the 15th century to the 18th century.
Italian lute tablature consisted of figures placed on the 6 horizontal lines that represented the 6 strings of the lute; the rhythmic values were represented above the musical staff by the signs that indicated the semibreve, the minim, the semiminim, the eighth note.
French tablature used letters instead of numbers; and the staff, at first composed of 5 lines (for a 5-string lute), passes to 6 toward the middle of the 17th century, the era in which the whole system was radically modified. The indications of time are expressed by true notes written on the staff. German tablature, the most complex of all, having also started from the notation for a 5-string lute (15th century), was later enriched by the signs necessary for the added 6th string (16th century) and comprises numbers and alphabetical letters arranged diastematically under the signs of time (of a type similar to the Italian ones) and between the bar lines.
Tablatures for popular instruments are still in use with characters similar to the tablatures of the 16th century, with 6 lines for the guitar, 4 for the 4-string ukulele, etc.
Of the ancient alphabetical notation, supplanted in the Latin countries by the Guidonian syllables, a living trace remains in the nomenclature of the gamut among the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples, among whom the gamut "la-si" is expressed by the letters A-H. It should be noted, however, the difference observed for "si b", which for the Germans is symbolized by the letter B, while for the English it is symbolized by the letter H. - See pl. XL.
Bibliography7 works
Geschichte der Notation Notenschrift und Notendruck, Leipzig 1878; H. E. Wooldridge, Early English harmony, 1st series, London 1897; G. Gasperini, L'arte di interpretare la scrittura della musica vocale del Cinquecento, Florence 1902; J. Wolf, Geschichte der Mensuralnotation von 1250 bis 1460, 3 vols., Leipzig 1904; G. Gasperini, Storia della semiografia musicale, Milan 1905; H. Bellermann, Die Mensuralnoten und Taktzeichen, Berlin 1906; J. Wolf, Handbuch der Notationkunde, 2 vols., Leipzig 1913-19; M. Scheider, Geschichte der Mehrstimmigkeit, Berlin 1935; W. Apel, The notation of polyphonic music 900-1600, Cambridge (Mass.) 1949; O. Strunk, Source readings in music history, New York 1950.
Luisa Cervelli