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| 16nth century notation |
WHY DID NOTATION START?
In ancient times, and still in some cultures today, people did not need to write down music. They passed on their music from one generation to the next by learning and remembering tunes. One reason why people started to write music down was to help them remember particular pieces of music. Another reason was to preserve music. Music that was kept in someone’s memory could be easily forgotten and lost. Music written down on a piece of paper could be copied, distributed and carefully preserved for future generations.
DIFFERENT KINDS OF NOTATION
Many different kinds of notation developed across the world. But whatever system musicians used, it needed to show two basic facts: the pitch of a note (how high or low it is), and the length of a note. Some notation systems showed the performer how to play the notes. This was done by indicating where to put the fingers to produce a particular note. This system is known as tablature. It is still used today, especially for the guitar.
The earliest systems of notation date from the Ancient Egyptians and the Mesopotamians. The Ancient Greeks used the letters of their alphabet to represent different pitches. The earliest examples of tablature come from China, written for a stringed instrument called a qin, a type of zither.
FROM NEUMES TO NOTES
When you read a piece of music today, you are using a system of notation that developed over many centuries. The shapes of the notes came originally from neumes. These were signs written over the top or below the words of a chant. They helped the performer to remember a particular group of notes. Gradually the neumes developed, until by about 1200 they were square-shaped. Meanwhile, from the 10th century onwards, people began to draw a horizontal line to help indicate pitch. The position of the neumes above, below or on the line showed how high or low the pitch was. At first there was just one line, then two, then four and five. By about 1200, the notation showed the pitch of a note quite clearly, but how long the note was supposed to last was still unclear.
The next developments happened quite quickly. People began to write different note shapes to indicate different lengths of notes. They also showed when a particular voice was silent with the use of a symbol called a rest. There were different rest shapes to indicate how long the silence lasted. The first “time signatures” appeared in France in the 14th century. By about 1450, when white, unfilled note shapes were used for the first time, musical notation looked very like the modern notation we use today.
THE STAVE
In modern Western notation, people write music on five horizontal lines, called a staff or stave. Each line and the space between each line on the stave represents a different pitch. At the beginning of every stave you will find a sign called a clef. The clef tells you the pitch of one of the lines or spaces. From this you can work out the pitches of all the other lines and spaces on the stave. There are four types of clef: treble, alto, tenor and bass. Treble and bass are the most common.
PITCH
HOW LONG IS A NOTE?
You can work out how long a note should last by its shape. The longest note is a breve, or double whole note. A semibreve, or whole note, lasts half as long as a breve. A minim (half note) lasts half as long as a whole note. A crotchet (quarter note) lasts a quarter as long as a whole note. A quaver (eighth note) lasts an eighth of the time of a whole note. You can keep dividing a whole note to get semiquavers (sixteenth notes), demisemiquavers (thirty-second notes) and so on. Similarly, the shapes of rests show how long a silence should be.
METRE
In written music, a composer groups the notes and rests into units of time called bars. The beginning and end of a bar is indicated by a vertical line across the stave, called a bar line. When you listen to a piece of music, you will notice that it usually has a pulse or “beat”. This pulse often falls into groups of two, three or four, with the first beat of the group having the strongest emphasis. This is called the metre. Composers indicate the metre of a piece of music by using a time signature. A time signature has two numbers. The top number shows the number of musical beats in each bar. The bottom number shows what kind of beats they are. For instance, a time signature of ¬ means that there are two crotchets, or quarter notes, in every bar.
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