| Neume |
Articles about Neume |
Information AboutNeume |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT NEUME | |
| christian music | |
| musical notation | |
|
to it interpreted.]] EARLY HISTORY Although Chant was probably sung since the earliest days of the church, for centuries they were only transmitted orally. The earliest systems involving neumes are of Aramaic origin and were used to notate inflections in the quasi-emmelic recitation of the Christian holy scriptures. As such they resemble functionally a similar system used for the notation of recitation of the Qur'an , the holy book of Islam. This early system was called ''ekphonetic notation'', from the Greek ''ekphonesis'' meaning quasi-melodic recitation of text. Around the 9th Century neumes began to become shorthand mnemonic aids for the melodic recitation of chant proper. A prevalent view is that neumatic notation was first developed in the Eastern Roman Empire (see Byzantium and Byzantine Music ). This seems plausible given the well-documented peak of musical composition and cultural activity in major cities of the empire (now regions of southern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Israel) at that time. The corpus of extant Byzantine music in manuscript and printed form is far larger than that of the Gregorian Chant , due in part to the fact that neumes fell in disuse in the west after the rise of modern staff notation and with it the new techniques of polyphonic music, while the Eastern tradition of Greek Orthodox church music and the reformed neume notation remains alive until today. Slavic neume notations (" Znamennoe Singing ") are on the whole even more difficult to decipher and transcribe than Byzantine or Gregorian neume notations. USE IN WESTERN PLAINCHANT The earliest Western notation for chant appears in the 9th century. These early staffless neumes, called cheironomic or '''in campo aperto''', appeared as freeform wavy lines above the text. Various scholars see these as deriving from between pitches within a neume, nor the relative starting pitches of different syllables' neumes. There is evidence that the earliest Western Musical Notation , in the form of neumes ''in camp aperto'' (without Staff -lines), was created at Metz around 800, as a result of Charlemagne 's desire for Frank ish church musicians to retain the performance nuances used by the Roman singers. James Grier ''Ademar de Chabannes, Carolingian Musical Practices, and "Nota Romana"'' , Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Spring, 2003), pp. 43-98, retrieved July 2007 Presumably these were intended only as mnemonics for melodies learned by ear. The earliest extant manuscripts (9th-10th centuries) of such neumes include:
In the early 11th century, Beneventan neumes (from the churches of Benevento in southern Italy) were written at varying distances from the text to indicate the overall shape of the melody; such neumes are called '''heightened''' or '''diastematic''' neumes, which showed the relative pitches between neumes. Shortly after this, one to four Staff lines clarified the exact relationship between pitches, an innovation traditionally ascribed to Guido D'Arezzo . One line was marked as representing a particular pitch, usually C or F. These neumes resembled the same thin, scripty style of the chironomic notation. In 13th-century England, Sarum chant was notated using square noteheads, a practice which subsequently spread throughout Europe; in Germany, a variant called '''Gothic neumes''' continued to be used until the 16th century. By the 13th Century , the neumes of Gregorian chant were usually written in ''square notation'' on a staff with four lines and three spaces and a clef marker, as in the 14th-15th century ''Graduale Aboense'' shown here. In square notation, small groups of ascending notes on a syllable are shown as stacked squares, read from bottom to top, while descending notes are written with diamonds read from left to right. In Melisma tic chants, in which a syllable may be sung to a large number of notes, a series of smaller such groups of neumes are written in succession, read from left to right. A special symbol called the custos, placed at the end of a system, showed which pitch came next at the start of the following system. Special neumes such as the oriscus, quilisma, and liquescent neumes, indicate particular vocal treatments for these notes. This system of square notation is standard in modern chantbooks. SOLESMES NOTATION Various manuscripts and printed editions of Gregorian chant, using varying styles of square-note neumes, circulated throughout the Catholic church for centuries. Some editions added rhythmic patterns, or Meter , to the chants. In the 19th century the monks of the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes , particularly Dom Joseph Pothier (1835-1923) and Dom André Mocquereau (1849-1930) collected Facsimile s of the earliest manuscripts and published them in a book called '' Paléographie Musicale ''. They also assembled definitive versions of many of the chants, and developed a standardized form of the square-note notation which was adopted by the Catholic church and is still in use in publications such as the Liber Usualis (although there are also published editions of this book in modern notation). As a general rule, the notes of a single neume are never sung to more than one syllable; all three pitches of a three-note neume, for example, must all be sung on the same syllable. (This is not universally accepted; Richard Crocker has argued that in the special case of the early Aquitanian polyphony of the St. Martial School , neumes must have been "broken" between syllables to facilitate the coordination of parts.) However, a single syllable may be sung to so many notes that several neumes in succession are used to notate it. The single-note neumes indicate that only a single note corresponds to that syllable. Chants which primarily use single-note neumes are called ''syllabic''; chants with typically one multi-note neume per note are called ''neumatic'', and those with many neumes per note are called ''melismatic''. RHYTHMIC INTERPRETATION The Solesmes monks also determined, based on their research, said that the second group, called ''mensuralists'', "have an impressive amount of historical evidence on their side," (''Music in the Middle Ages'', p. 146), but the equal-note Solesmes interpretation has permeated the musical world, apparently due to its ease of learning and resonance with modern musical taste.William P. Mahrt, "Chant," ''A Performer's Guide to Medieval Music'' p. 18. ILLUSTRATIONS Examples of neumes may be seen here: [http://www.music.vt.edu/musicdictionary/appendix/notation/Neumes.html . Clefs Neumes are written on a four-line Staff on the lines and spaces, unlike modern music notation, which uses five lines. A Clef at the beginning of each line indicates the location of C or F on any of the lines, as shown: Note that chant does not rely on any Absolute Pitch ; the clefs are only to help find the half and whole steps (see Hexachord ). Neumes representing single notes The virga and punctum are sung identically. Scholars disagree on whether the bipunctum indicates a note twice as long, or whether the same note should be re-articulated as the name ''repercussive'' implies. Neumes representing two notes When two notes are one above the other, as in the podatus, the lower note is always sung first. Three-note neumes The fact that the first two notes of the porrectus are connected as a diagonal rather than as individual notes seems to be a scribe's shortcut. Compound neumes Several neumes in a row can be juxtaposed for a single syllable, but the following usages have specific names. These are only a few examples. Other basic markings Interpretive marks These markings, although present in almost all early manuscripts, are subject to great dispute. Other interpretations of the quilisma:
There are also ''litterae significativae'' in many manuscripts, usually interpreted to indicate variations in tempo, e.g. c = ''celeriter'' (fast), t = ''tenete'' (hold) (an early form of the Tenuto ), a = ''auge'' (lengthen, as in a Tie ). The Solesmes editions omit all such letters. OTHER FUNCTIONS OF WESTERN NEUMES Neumes were used for notating other kinds of melody than plainchant, including Troubadour and Trouvère melodies, monophonic versus and conductus, and the individual lines of Polyphonic songs. In some traditions, such as the Notre Dame School of polyphony, certain patterns of neumes were used to represent particular rhythmic patterns called Rhythmic Mode s. OTHER TYPES OF NEUMES
NOTES REFERENCES
|
|
|