ON THE TREATMENT OF PITCH IN EARLY MUSIC WRITING

Abstract

When a practical way of recording music in writing was invented in the early ninth century, it defined neither the pitches of specific notes in a melody, nor the intervallic relations between successive notes. Nineteenth-century views of such notations considered them primitive; more recent descriptions have recognised that precise pitch notation was not a basic aim. But how did ninth-century neumatic notations deal with pitch, and, if the role of memory was not usurped by written records, what role did notation fulfil? In this study, the interaction of memory and writing is explored. Notations written by a French and by a German scribe (F-La MS 239 and S-SG MS 359) are seen to follow different strategies for the arrangement of signs above the text, striking divergent visual balances between pitch information and the text–music link. In each notation the reader is led along a path of recall, with more or less emphatic written signals provided as required.