Sunday, January 25, 2009

Early Music Notation

As music education became more prevalent in the Middle Ages and necessary to the propagation of the Church, a system of music notation began to develop. This system ensured that churches throughout most of Europe would use the same music in liturgical services.

Medieval churches used a style of singing now referred to as chant as part of their worship. There were many different local chant dialects, such as Celtic, Gallican, Mozarabic, Ambrosian and Gregorian, but when Charlemagne was crowned king of the Holy Roman Empire in 800 A.D., he and his successors succeeded in perpetuating the Gregorian repertory and almost completely suppressing all other forms (Grout 2001, 24). Charlemagne achieved this by sending musical missionaries throughout Europe, and these missionaries claimed that the source of the chants was St. Gregory himself (Grout 2001, 37).

Most early transmission of chant was achieved orally. In order for standardized chant to succeed, a method of music notation needed to develop. Initially, signs called neumes were written over the text to indicated ascending or descending patterns. At some critical point in music history around the tenth century, a scribe drew a red horizontal line to indicate the pitch F, and the neumes were placed in relation above or below it. Later, a second yellow line was added to indicate C. Guido of Arezzo described a staff in the eleventh century with lines for F, C and G, which eventually became the modern clefs (Grout 2001, 56). The modern plainsong notation that most people would recognize has a four-line staff with neumes sung with the same rhythmic duration (Grout 2001, 36).

The development of music notation assured that chants could be sung nearly the same everywhere, “Thus notation was both a result of the striving for uniformity and a means of perpetuating that uniformity” (Grout 2001, 38). This brought about a need for more formal music instruction, causing music education to expand even further in the Middle Ages (Abeles, Hoffer, and Klotman 1995, 6).


Abeles, Harold F., Charles R. Hoffer, and Robert H. Klotman. Foundations of Music Education, 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Thomas Higher Education, 1995.

Grout, Donald J., and Claude V. Palisca. A History of Western Music, 6th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

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