Who invented notation

Wikimedia Commons. But I want to take you to Syria. A piece of music exists that was written — we think — between and BCE. And in so doing, shaped a whole tradition that continues today. In this question and answer series, Russell gives his take on your burning questions about classical music. The origins of music notation Fri 25 Sep Audio Player failed to load. The system catches on like wildfire, with each monastery across Europe making its own in-house "improvements" - different shaped symbols are used for small groups of notes.

Benedictine monk Guido d'Arezzo is a music teacher extraordinaire. It is Guido who has the bright idea of drawing a line on the page, so that neumes can be placed with a fixed pitch. He begins by using a single red line, which he labels with one note - either F or C. This is the starting point.

Neumes are then written on the line, above it or below it, showing relative pitch. The note letter placed at the beginning of the line will become known as the clef. Guido develops his system over the years, adding extra lines and different colours. His system is widely adopted, and it is the four-line stave which gains most favour. At the same time, the squiggly neumes are gradually replaced with square-shaped note symbols.

By the 12th century we find plenty of manuscripts using a 5-line stave. We also find the first key signatures which at this stage consist of just one flat. There were no sharp key signatures at this time. Mensural notation is born - in other words, they figure out how to make a musical note represent both pitch and rhythm. Plainchants have become so complicated rhythmically, that a method is needed to notate the rhythm, rather than leave it up to the memory alone.

A complex system is derived, which allows for four basic "time signatures" called "mensurations". Theorists decide that there are two types of rhythm - duple and triple. Each of those can be further subdivided into a duple or triple rhythm, making four possibilities. Quadruple rhythm doesn't feature.

Four symbols are invented to represent these mensurations. A vertical line cut through the symbol meant that the basic beat was halved.

Much early keyboard music was for an early keyboard instrument called a virginal similar to a harpsichord , and many collections of hand-written virginal music are held today in museums in Europe and beyond.

Another interesting collection for folk music historians is called the Skene Manuscript which mostly consists of melodies with some bass notes, and this includes the song Flowers of the Forest. Various methods of "printing" have been in use for many centuries. However it was the invention of the printing press using moveable type which allowed for printing on a large scale.

This allowed books, news and information to become more readily available and helped to spread ideas more rapidly across the world. It wasn't long before the concepts of printing text were applied to the printing of music, and the first attempts at this were made in the 15th and 16th centuries.

In England Elizabeth I granted Thomas Tallis and William Byrd his pupil at the time a monopoly to print and publish music, and this resulted in their works becoming widely known. Elsewhere in Europe the development of printed music helped to give composers a degree of independence from their wealthy patrons since they could earn an income from publishing their music.

The printing of music also helped to standardise notation symbols, since there was less room for the inevitable variations that arose from hand-written music. Composers still wrote their music by hand in the first place, and this was then passed to copyists to produce parts for first performances, before later being type-set for printing and wider distribution.

In general composers will typically go through many drafts when developing their works, and handwritten manuscripts in museums frequently show an evolution of ideas, with sections of music scored out, and new sections of music or new parts added in. See the article Manuscripts, Pens and Composers by Jeffrey Dane which has many examples of hand-written scores. Many composers such as Beethoven for example used notebooks to record themes or ideas which might be mulled over for many years before being developed into complete works.

However printing facilitates a much wider and faster sharing of ideas, and musicians and other composers can learn about the music of others without needing to attend concerts of their works.

Widespread availability of printed music also allows music to be studied and analysed by students. Different methods of representing music have continued to evolve. Some of these alternative or supporting methods are used for particular instruments. For example, it is quite common to see little pictograms used for recorders and other wind instruments to show which holes on the instrument should be covered or partially covered to play a particular note. Similarly many percussion instruments do not produce notes of a definite pitch.

The notation for such "untuned percussion" may use a different number of lines or just a single line to represent when a note is struck, and a range of different symbols to indicate in more detail how the note should be struck. The guitar is a very popular instrument today, and alternative forms of notation can be used for its music.

The simplist is a list of chord names with or without chord diagrams which indicate chords to be strummed, and guitar "Tablature" or Tabs uses numbers on a stave of 6 lines to indicate at which fret particular strings should be stopped. Guitar Tabs have descended from that of an earlier stringed instrument, the Lute. It is curious that guitar tabs look very similar to conventional notation, despite the fact that the lines in their stave have a completely different meaning.

Some modern styles of music are so unusual that they need strange new forms of music to define them. In fact some such musical pieces don't use notation at all, but consist of a set of instructions to be followed by the musician or musicians. Despite these alternative forms of notation, standard musical notation remains a cornerstone of Western music education.

Around , Franco of Cologne invented a system of symbols for different note durations, which consisted mostly of square or diamond-shaped black noteheads with no stems. In , Philippe de Vitry built on his idea, creating a system of mensural time signatures for minims, crotchets and semiquavers.

By , white notes had begun to overtake black notation, so most note values were written with white noteheads — as you would write a semibreve or minim. Then in the 17th century, note values started to look a bit rounder. Throughout the s, music notation continued to evolve according to the music of Renaissance and Baroque composers.

So when instrumental music overtook vocal music as the most popular genre, a change in music notation was needed. So, composers began to introduce barlines, dynamic markings and performance directions — like this one:.