AKARSH SHEKHAR
Note For Note : The Origins Of Musical Notation
In the monasteries of the first Christian millennium , the only music that had remained from the Roman period was the memorized Gregorian chants .
In the 10th century , various forms of musical writing were created , passing from memory to paper , first in a tetragram , and finally in a stave . No culture in the world had done this before , even though the Chinese , for example , had a musical writing code in the form of tablature that tells where to place your fingers on a stringed instrument .
Tablatures are also used in some current music such as pop , but they do not indicate the rhythm or the melody , since one assumes that one knows the song , as was the case with shorthand sketches ( neumes ) in the 9th century . Thanks to the musical notation system created by Guido ( Monaco ) De Arezzo ( 995 AD-1050 AD ), we can today enjoy works as wonderful as Mozart ’ s Requiem or Beethoven ’ s Ninth .
The need to create a musical notation arose in Western culture , during the Middle Ages . At that time , the music of Christianity had reached the Roman Empire , which practiced this religion and encompassed different cultures and languages .
Music accompanied religious services , such as mass and canonical hours . Gregory the Great , the Pope of the time , created a single form of Christian song to take it to all places where Christianity existed and to be sung in Latin .
Western culture developed a system of musical notation derived from the new techniques of counterpoint ( composition made up of several simultaneous voices ). There arose , gradually , the vocal groups called Chapels that later , in the Baroque , were called choirs . The Gregorian Chant was named in honor of Pope Gregory I , The Great .
In its beginnings , it was a song composed of a single melody ; then new composition techniques were developed , using different voices , and this structured a musical system that was difficult to memorize because it was based on neumes , ambiguous symbols that showed whether the melody went up or down .
The songs were taken to other monasteries . Meanwhile , different forms of more complex composition were developing , demanding a more precise style of musical notation . The Guido of Arezzo provided the bases for this new writing system : the tetragram , which was later called the pentagram , a series of five lines to locate the musical notes ( sounds of different heights ), and assigned the name to each of the seven sounds that make up our sound scale .
He took the hymn to San Juan , in which he identified that each phrase begins with a different note and used the first syllable to name the seven notes : ut , re , mi , fa , sol , la . Centuries later , Anselmo de Flandes , inserted the syllable yes , and in the 17th century Giovanni Battista Doni , an Italian musicologist , substituted the note ut for do to facilitate solfege ( reading musical notes ).
In the development of the spelling of musical notation , the first graphics were squares , diamonds , and rectangles to indicate the different rhythms ; This was called proportional quadratic notation , used for the ease of writing these figures with a pen or nib . Then , throughout the Renaissance , the representations changed : the round , the white , and the black , which are used today , with the same proportion of values for rhythm .
So far , there are no musical notes other than those already named ; however , there are particular cases . In contemporary music , different spellings have been created , but one cannot speak of a “ universal language ”. We must differentiate improvised music that , although it follows guidelines drawn up for improvisation , does not go on the staff . Some examples of this are Jazz and folklore ; and the written one , the one we know as classical or academic .
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