MUSICAL NOTATION

written, printed, or other visual representation of music. As a memory aid it helps shape a composition to a level of sophistication that would not be possible with only an oral tradition, and as communication it helps preserve music for later performance and analysis. There is some evidence that the notation of music was practiced by the Egyptians from the 3rd millennium BC and by others in the Middle East in antiquity. The earliest notation that can without doubt be recognized as musical, however, dates from the 9th century AD in Europe and the 10th century in China and Japan. These notational systems were distinctly different. In the Far East, as later in India and elsewhere in Asia, music was notated with the use of characters for sounds. Rhythmic motifs could also be prescribed in a similar way. In Europe, on the other hand, the foundations were laid for a purely symbolic notation of music, which does not seem to have arisen in any other part of the world, nor was it needed. Outside Europe the teaching and learning of music was to remain an essentially oral matter, whereas within Europe musicians wanted a permanent record to take account of the growing complexity of their work. It is not surprising, therefore, that symbolic notation should have had its origins close to those of polyphony, in Carolingian (8th- and 9th-century-AD) Europe. The earliest notation, in the form of squiggled shapes called neumes, seems to have grown from the use of accents to indicate melodic rise and fall and also from the hand movements that the leader of a choir might use to suggest the flow of the line. Gradually this notation became standardized, with a few neumes standing as symbols of single notes or turns of phrase, while the invention of the staff (the horizontal lines with their spaces on which music is written), associated with Guido of Arezzo in the middle of the 11th century, made it possible for notes to be represented by the placing of neumes on a grid of four or five lines, as in modern staff notation. At about the same time, different neumes began to be used to represent different durations, so that the notation indicated not only the pitch contour of a melody but also its rhythm. The desire for increased precision in rhythmic notation eventually brought about the metamorphosis of the neumatic system, for, as different symbols were introduced for progressively smaller rhythmic values, there was a need to clear away the complexity of the neumes in identifying groups of two or three notes together. This change accompanied the general change in music from a concept of mode to a concept of scale, and in notational terms it became complete during the 14th and 15th centuries. The neumes survived only in the notation of plainsong, where they remain in use. By the early 16th century, notation had assumed much of its modern form, with the essential components of staff, clef (a character placed at the beginning of the staff to determine the position of the notes), time signature, and durational values, though bar lines only gradually became widespread during the 16th and 17th centuries as an aid in ensemble performance. Since the mid-20th century, however, the conventional system of notation has been widely revised and even abandoned. New symbols have been introduced for flexible rhythmic values, pitches outside the normal chromatic scale, clusters of adjacent notes, and other unconventional musical elements. Sometimes composers have exchanged the symbolic system for graphic signs, especially in the notation of electronic music, which presents special problems in so often having nothing to do with the normal categorizations of pitch and rhythm. More relaxed, suggestive sorts of notation have also been used by composers not wishing to prescribe their music totally. visual record of heard or imagined musical sound, or a set of visual instructions for performance of music. It usually takes written or printed form and is a conscious, comparatively laborious process. Its use is occasioned by one of two motives: as an aid to memory or as communication. By extension of the former, it helps the shaping of a composition to a level of sophistication that is impossible in a purely oral tradition. By extension of the latter, it serves as a means of preserving music (although incompletely and imperfectly) over long periods of time, facilitates performance by others, and presents music in a form suitable for study and analysis. The primary elements of musical sound are pitch, or the location of musical sound on the scale (hence interval, or distance, between notes); duration (hence rhythm, metre, tempo); timbre or tone colour; and volume (hence stress, attack). In practice, no notation can handle all of these elements with precision. Most cope with a selection of them in varying degrees of refinement. Some handle only a single patterne.g., a melody, a rhythm; others handle several simultaneous patterns. Additional reading Willi Apel, The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 9001600, 5th ed. (1961), a standard textbook, including staff notation and tablatures, and many facsimiles used as exercises for transcription; Erhard Karkoschka, Das Schriftbild der neuen Musik (1966), an excellently documented study of contemporary notation; Walter Kaufmann, Musical Notations of the Orient: Notational Systems of Continental East, South and Central Asia (1967); Carl Parrish, The Notation of Medieval Music (1957), excellent facsimiles; Emanuel Winternitz, Musical Autographs from Monteverdi to Hindemith (1955), a study of musical handwriting, with many facsimiles.