I've often marvelled at how musical notation conveys so much information with just a combination of various dots and lines, and wondered how it developed the way it did. I recently read a book on this subject titled Capturing Music by Thomas Forrest Kelly. (Yes, I admit I am a total musical theory geek.) Although it didn't answer all my questions, I did learn a lot.
There is no known written record of music from the Ancient Greeks and Romans and we know very little about it. In the Middle Ages, music was learned by rote, that is, by copying another person. Almost all music was sung at first, and had words, taken from the various liturgical texts in the church. Many scholars were quoted as saying they believed it was impossible to notate music. For centuries, music was simply learned by listening to another person, and the various chants, hymns, songs and so on were passed down generation by generation in this way.
Eventually they began to use symbols over the words to indicate a vocal embellishment over a given note or notes. This led to other innovations, and dots on lines were used to show the direction of the melody (up or down) and by how much. They still would have had to depend on having heard someone sing it, but perhaps this primitive notation served as a sort of "reminder" of what they had heard. Undoubtedly, someone saw the potential of this, and there began to be notes written on lines which did correspond to actual notes.
The hardest nut to crack was rhythm. When music was sung, the words determined the rhythm, to some degree. And again, you would just copy someone else to get the rhythm as well as the notes. But when notes began to be written, there would have to be something to indicate the rhythm. If someone was singing solo, they would have a lot of leeway to do the rhythm as they saw fit, but if multiple people were singing together, they would need notation so they would all be in sync. The written record shows all sorts of attempts at this. For example, the reason we show eighth notes with a bar across the top is that these "faster" notes were sung over one syllable of a word, so the line connecting them indicated that.
Music was probably a lot more fluid-sounding before rhythmic notation. But of course it also had its limits, especially where multiple people sang or played together. Harmony, which evolved from multiple lines of music sung together, would have been impossible without rhythmic notation. So it was a small price to pay, I think we would all agree!
For years I have wondered why our notes on the staff correspond to the white keys on the piano, or the scale of C Major. Notation preceded the invention of the piano (or harpsichord) by many years, so it wasn't because of the keyboard. If anything, it's the other way around. Although the book I read didn't answer this completely, I speculate that the staff we use today was based on the scale that we call A Minor, which the Greeks called Aeolian. This may have been the primary scale that the early chants were sung in. (Is it just a coincidence that the first note on the piano is an A? Probably.) Later on, there was a need for an occasional "out of scale" tone, and it seems that the flat sign evolved first, and later the sharp sign. It appears that they didn't think of notating in different keys as we do today, and there was no "key signature" as we now use.
When you compare musical notation to our alphabet, it's pretty incredible. Although every novel, poem, treatise, essay or memo is written using just our 26 letters, and once we know the alphabet we can read or write an unlimited amount of material, the alphabet itself doesn't give us any information about inflection, rhythm, speed or other nuances if you speak the words aloud (or even silently in your mind). We need punctuation, and such indicators as italics, underlining, and other methods to convey more specific meaning. Yet music notation, with fewer actual symbols, tells you a tremendous amount, not only what to play, but how to play it, yet still allowing for a great deal of flexibility which is necessary for music to be interpreted differently by individual musicians. (We still need the addition of other symbols and directives, just like the alphabet does, for the composer to indicate qualities as dynamics. I will discuss this in a future post.)
We who play an instrument (or sing) probably take our musical notation for granted. But it's good to appreciate the amazing evolution which enables us to experience and communicate the beauty of music.
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