The Alphanumeric Sixteenth Century: Tablature reassessed (original) (raw)
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With Johannes Keller. How to graphically represent a new and extended range of intervals is a fundamental question in the complex musical vision (‘prattica musicale’) described by Nicola Vicentino in his treatise L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (Rome 1555). The first part of this paper examines specific aspects of Vicentino’s notation. The elements he used were not invented ex novo but are the result of improvement and resemantisation of existing notational practices. Vicentino’s effort to create a differenciated representation of a highly complex pitch system clearly distinguishes him within the theoretical and musical landscape of his time. The notational solutions proposed by Lusitano, Danckerts, Zarlino and other music theorists to representing intervals of the chromatic and enharmonic genus reveal a substantially different approach. Working with reconstructions of Vicentino’s keyboard instruments (the arciorgano and the archicembalo with 31 or 36 keys per octave) force the modern-day ‘users’ of those instruments to renegotiate the relationship between note names, musical notation, key names and actual sounding pitch. The second part of this paper presents Vicentino’s approach to these concepts and reflects on its implications. This includes a critical comparison with conventional contemporary Western music notation and theory, exposing certain limitations which challenge the application of popular strategies for digital music notation, such as MEI (‘music encoding initiative’).
From Melody to Scale: The Eleventh-Century Transition of Musical Notation
Kalamazoo, 2023
From almost as soon as we have theorists talking about chant, we have them fitting the chant melodies onto their available scale known as the gamut. Meanwhile, singers seem to have continued to sing the melodies phrase by phrase without reference to pitches on a scale—to the considerable frustration of theorists. It is not until Guido d’Arezzo (died after 1033) that we have the beginnings of a workable notation system that relates sung pitches to their place on the gamut. Guido’s invention of the hexachord allowed singers to sing a melody (at least with reference to pitch) without hearing it before, provided of course that the notation gave the necessary pitch indications. This association between notation and pitches on a background scale (for the medievals, the gamut) is so strong for us today that we still tend to think of notation that doesn’t specify pitches as unreadable. This paper will examine the evolution of one notation system, Aquitanian neumes, from heighted neumes without a pitch reference to precisely heighted neumes with clear pitch reference.
Early Music, Notation and Performance
Per Musi
In this interview granted to Marcus Held, Clive Brown discourses about his career dedicated to the historical investigations related to the 18th and 19th centuries music, with emphasis on past performance practices. Brown, who witnessed the consolidation of the Early Music in England, recalls the processes of (re)discovery not only of the past repertoire, but also of the musical thought. With particular interest in musical notation and its intellectual processes, the researcher points that the approach to the score has definitely changed throughout the centuries and, from that, many challenges are posed for the activity of contemporary musical editing.
Turning the tables: reassessing tablature
MSA Annual Conference, 2021
This paper was read at the 2021 annual conference of the Musicological Society of Australia. It is drawn from my forthcoming book, edited with David Dolata and Philippe Vendrix: "Tablature: Alternate notations 1350-1750" to be published by Brepols. It presents a new vision of tablature and its role in Western culture resulting from a ten-year study of tablatures, 1350-1750. The surviving repertoire of more than 70,000 works for more than forty instruments, including human voice, is preserved in a variety of notations that are alternatives to conventional mensural notation. We examined all kinds of tablatures, from the widely accepted mainstream forms to the more idiosyncratic and experimental varieties that gained little traction in the real world of musical practice. On the notational side, this paper explores the nature of tablature, the essence of its graphic system, the commonalities between systems and the contemporary challenges to renewing the associated terminology. From another perspective, it considers the marginalisation of tablature music in our cultural heritage, and the attendant historiographical deficiencies that result from the near-total exclusion of the repertoire from musicological thinking. Tablature can be revealed as more than a simple notation for "playing by numbers,” instead an alternative way of thinking about music and transmitting it. Tablature fulfilled special and necessary functions, not only as the first viable system of score notation, but also permitting the expression of dimensions of performance-related information that were impossible in conventional notation. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, tablature was a mainstream notation, essential to the social fabric of music, and important whether in their broader use as conducting scores, or in facilitating the popular transmission of elite repertoires.
Between Composition and Transcription: Ferruccio Busoni and Music Notation
‘The new art of music is derived from the old signs -- and these now stand for the musical art itself.’1 With this statement, Ferruccio Busoni (1866--1924) summarized his main criticism of traditional music notation -- that it was lifeless and outdated. Based on an analysis of Busoni’s organic method of keyboard notation (1909), an examination of composition sketches and performance scores, and an investigation of his writings about notation in aesthetic texts -- in particular the Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music (1907) -- this article shows how Busoni’s multifaceted views about notation forged a middle ground between the work as text and the work as performance in an age enthralled to the idea of Werktreue. In addition, it traces the continuing influence of Busoni’s ideas about notation on Arnold Schoenberg and other contemporaneous theorists and composers.
English: NOTUS RESEARCH — NOTUS Music Notation: HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL CONTEXT
NOTUS Music Notation: HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL CONTEXT, 2016
This dissertation is part of the introduction to the NOTUS HANDBOOK and has been reproduced in its entirety. She describes the difficulties in the age-old conventional music notation and the confirmation of these difficulties by leading theorists as well as composers and practicing musicians and why an innovation in the age-old music notation is urgently needed. It discredits the way NOTUS responds from within the contemporary domain of 'visual communication' and why this answer is so different from other answers that have been proposed over the centuries. It ends with some contemporary social insights that are detrimental to the survival of the noted Western musical heritage if there is no change in musical notation that is in keeping with contemporary visual society. This dissertation is followed by the table of contents of the NOTUS Music Notation Handbook.