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"Musical notation History To 1400."
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Where sight meets sound : the poetics of late medieval music writing
\"The main function of western musical notation is incidental: it prescribes and records sound. But during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, notation began to take on an aesthetic life all its own. Composers sometimes asked singers to read the music in unusual ways-backwards, upside-down, or at a reduced speed-to produce sounds whose relationship to the written notes is anything but obvious. This book explores innovations in late-medieval music writing as well as how modern scholarship on notation has informed-sometimes erroneously-ideas about the premodern era. By viewing notation as a complex technology that did more than record sound, the book revolutionizes the way we think about music's literate traditions\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
‘Clefless’ notation, counterpoint and the fa-degree
In recent years a number of music scholars have interpreted ‘clefless’ musical works from the 15th century as grounded on the mechanism of hexachordal solmization. The basic assumption that drives such analyses is that medieval and Renaissance musicians were trained to understand the notated pitches as embedded in segments of six syllables and six pitches. Thus, the primary function of the flat and sharps signs found in ‘clefless’ works has been taken to be one of indicating the fa and mi degrees of underlying hexachords. However, the particular notational features of a ‘clefless’ rondeau, Gilles Binchois’s Mon seul et souverain desir, may point to different conclusions. This study suggests that ‘clefless’ notation ultimately assigns priority to the octave-based notion of musical space (grounded on the seven claves) that shaped not only the structure of the gamut, but also the grammar of counterpoint. While six-syllable solmization may well have been successfully used to sight read this chanson, it was by no means a mandatory step for performance. The non-hexachordal approach to ‘clefless’ notation proposed here is in line with the early history of staffed notation, as well as with the general orientation of medieval and Renaissance theorists on the issue of hexachordal solmization.
Journal Article
