HISTORY OF MUSIC NOTATION

GUIDO D’AREZZO (b: c 991; d: after 1033)—music theorist: educated at the Benedictine Abbey of Pomposa. He later moved to Arezzo where Bishop Theodaldus invited him to train singers for the cathedral. In c 1028 he was called to Rome by John XIX to expound his new methods of notation and teaching, and shortly afterwards entered a monastery (probably at Avellana, near Arezzo). His fame as a pedagogue was legend- ary. His famous treatise Micrologus is the earliest comprehensive treatise on musical practice that includes a discussion of polyphonic music and plainchant; in it he devel- oped both a system of precise pitch notation relying (like the modern staff) on lines and spaces representing pitches defined by letters (clefs) and a technique of sight-singing based on the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la and on the so-called ‘Guidonian hand’. Next to Boethius' treatise it was the most copied and read instruction book in the .

FRANCO D’—At first, certain patterning of neume were used to represent the various rhythmic modes; later, in his (c.1280), Franco of Cologne created a clear indication for each note of its exact rhythmic length and selected certain neume to represent tones of long and short duration. In his system, the long value was in principle equal to three of the short values.

PHILIPPE D’VITRY—In the 14th century, , author of , which expands the system of Franco, codified the ready availability of duple divisions of the long and short notes. At the various rhythmic levels of a given piece either a 2:1 or a 3:1 relationship was implied, and a system of signs and colored notes developed for indi- cating which relationships were in force or were being temporarily altered.

MODERN SYSTEM—With the appearance of fractions in the 15th century, numbers indicated that one proportionality of rhythmic values was temporarily being substituted for another. Modern signatures evolved from these numbers. Bar lines, expression signs, and Italian terms to indicate tempo and dynamics came into use in the 17th century. With the adoption of equal temperament and the major and minor modes, signatures indicating a major key or its relative minor became conventional. They assumed their present form during the baroque period.

SOURCE: W. Apel, The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900–1600 (5th ed. 1961); C. F. A. Williams, The Story of Notation (1903, repr. 1969); E. Karkoschka, Notation in New Music (1972), G. Read, Music Notation (3d ed. 1972).