Musical Notation

I

Introduction

Musical Notation, system of written symbols that represent musical sounds. The primary requirement of any notation is that it be suited to the music it represents.

II

Western Staff Notation

The standard notation of Western music is a staff notation. Its basis is a staff (or stave) of five lines. Each line and the space between lines represents a different pitch. A given pitch is represented by a sign called a note, placed on a line or in a space. A clef, positioned at the beginning of every stave, indicates the pitch assigned to one of the lines, from which the others are reckoned. Since the octave contains 12 pitches, a semitone apart, and since the stave, for historical reasons, has lines and spaces only for seven pitches A, B, C, D, E, F, and G (five of which are a whole tone apart), three additional symbols are used. Placed next to a note, they alter its meaning, permitting the notation of the remaining pitches. They are the flat (b), which lowers the pitch of a note by a semitone; the sharp (#), which raises it by a semitone; and the natural (♮), which cancels a previous flat or sharp. If certain flats or sharps appear regularly throughout a piece (this is governed by the key of the music), their signs are placed next to the clef, in a key signature.

The durations of notes are indicated by their specific shapes; the durations of silences are set forth by signs called rests. The American terminology of notes and rests is useful for understanding their durational relationships: whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth, thirty-second, sixty-fourth, and so on, each being double or half the value of its neighbour in the series. In addition, a dot can be added after a note or rest to increase its value by half. Further dots each increase the length by half the value of the previous dot, so that a given note value could theoretically be followed by an infinite series of dots without ever reaching the value of the next note in the series (i.e. without ever doubling its value).

The British names for note values are historically derived: see the diagram entitled Musical Note Values for a comparison of British and US terms. It is interesting to note the process of rhythmic “inflation” that has taken place over the centuries: the tendency of a given note value to represent longer and longer periods of time. For instance, the longest note in modern notation, the breve, derives from the Latin word meaning “short”, while the minim, a quarter of its value, derives from the Latin word meaning “shortest” (although the appearance of both notes is different from the medieval originals). Hence over the years smaller and smaller subdivisions have had to be introduced. Over the last 200 years the crotchet has effectively come to be viewed as the “basic” rhythmic value, as the minim and semibreve were before it.

Metre, the grouping of musical beats into basic recurrent units, is also indicated. A time signature, which shows how the beats are to be grouped, is placed on the initial staff next to the key signature; and vertical lines (bar lines) mark off the metrical units, or bars. The time signature also indicates a system of stresses: The first beat of a metrical grouping is usually the strongest. Additional symbols indicate other aspects of the music. The notation of rhythm and metre are covered extensively in the article on musical rhythm. The complete notation of a piece of music is called the score. In performance, however, players perform from a part that only has their own line of music; only the conductor (if there is one) has the complete score.

Writers discussing music sometimes use the following system (called the Helmholtz system; also used in this encyclopedia) to specify pitches: c1 = middle c. c2 is an octave above middle c; each further octave is one number higher, starting at c each time. c = one octave below middle c, C = one octave below that, CC (or C1) = one further octave below, and so on.

III

History

Today's system developed over many centuries. The note shapes are derived from neumes, handwritten signs that were placed over the words of medieval chant. At first neumes gave only a vague indication of melodic directions and patterns. Gradually the shapes became more precise and, about ad 1000, stave lines were added: first one, then two, then four and five. By about 1200, the notation was reasonably exact as to pitch, but still quite vague regarding duration.

About that time the earliest durational notation appeared. Called modal notation, it specified a constantly repeated rhythmic mode, or pattern. About 1250 four durational note and rest shapes were established, as well as a set of rules for determining whether a given note should subdivide into two or three shorter notes. Additional symbols for smaller durations were soon added. Although this system measured duration, somewhat variably, it did not include metrical stress. Time signatures that regulated duration first appeared in 14th-century France. Each signature represented three levels of subdivision. Eventually one level was discarded. Most modern time signatures represent a basic unit plus one level of subdivision. With the introduction in the mid-15th century of white note heads (that is, unfilled outlines) in addition to the solid-colour note heads already in use, the system was very close to modern notation.

During the 17th and 18th centuries the final changes to modern key and metrical time signatures occurred. During this time, a notational device called figured bass was used to indicate harmony by adding numbers below the bass line (the “basso continuo”) to show what chords should be played above it. By the mid-18th century, subsidiary instructions as to tempo, articulation, performing techniques, and expressiveness were commonly added. The use of such symbols greatly accelerated in the 19th century.

In the mid-20th century, critics pointed out that contemporary music was not well served by a system that was based on the seven unevenly spaced pitches of medieval music. The same criticism applied to rhythm subdivisions that were mostly duple and that treated tempo, dynamics, and articulation only vaguely. However, continual modifications and developments of the system, which have been particularly intense over the last century, have shown staff notation to be a flexible, subtle and powerful tool. One such development has been “box notation” (used by Lutosławski and many others) in which a musical phrase is enclosed in a box followed by an arrow, showing that the phrase is to be repeated ad lib until the next signal from the conductor, either in co-ordination with another player or freely.

IV

Other Notational Systems

Alphabetical notations were used in ancient Greece and elsewhere. Jazz charts may indicate only the harmonic structure, leaving all the rest to the performer. In addition to their western uses, neumes have also been employed in China, Japan, and the Near East as well as for Tibetan chant.

Tablatures are compact notations that use signs, numbers, or letters, usually to notate fingerings rather than pitches. Modern popular guitar tablature is a small grid in which vertical lines represent the strings and horizontal lines represent the frets; black dots indicate where to put the fingers.

Composers of aleatoric compositions leave many elements deliberately vague and to chance; this is also true of their unconventional notation, which often uses nonmusical symbols and graphics to evoke an individual response from the performer; thus no two performances are the same.