Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]

4. Mensural notation from 1500.

(i) General.

(ii) Notes: shapes, colours, abbreviations.

(iii) The division of time.

(iv) The joining and separation of notes.

(v) Clefs, staves, leger lines.

(vi) Accidentals, key signatures.

(vii) Dynamics.

(viii) Scores; harmonic and descriptive notations.

Notation, §III, 4: Mensural notation from 1500

(i) General.

The simplified void notation of the late 15th century and the 16th, used throughout Europe for the international polyphonic repertory, was, like the medieval systems from which it developed, a singer’s notation. It was not well suited to notating more than a single melodic line, especially when associated with printing by movable type. In succeeding centuries, however, especially after the rise of the thoroughbass, theory and teaching were increasingly controlled by instrumentalists such as keyboard players, and the staff notation used for the bulk of the repertory was influenced by instrumental requirements, adopting many features that permitted it to express increasingly complex information. Conversely, keyboard tablature began to decline. The instrumental features adopted included, in the 16th and 17th centuries, the bar-line, beam and slur, permitting the clear grouping of notes for rhythmic and other purposes; the standardization of clefs, facilitating the sight-reading of even fairly complex textures; and the reintroduction of the score, which had been dropped in French notation in the 13th century. In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the demisemiquaver and the hemidemisemiquaver were added to the range of note values; keyboard notation adopted, when necessary for the sake of clarity, a score layout with more than two staves to the system, not previously used except in the partitura. In the 19th century, the vocabulary of signs for dynamics, accents and articulation was greatly extended; some novel features, which became basic to 20th-century practice, were introduced by Beethoven, Schumann and Liszt.

Thus notation continued to develop after the 16th century. Yet a rift gradually developed between notational theory and notational practice; professional musicians often came to treat theory as elementary and in consequence to expound it merely within the sphere of musical rudiments or incidentally in treatises on performance. This situation began to change only in the second half of the 19th century. Meanwhile, however, proposals for reform had been made, from the 17th century onwards, by those seeking a universal musical notation. Even though most proposed reforms were impracticable and were adopted by no-one but their inventors, as a whole they strikingly illustrate the desire of Western notators for a notation independent of any single musical style. Even a system as economical and adequate as Tonic Sol-fa was not adopted for the bulk of diatonic music: its limitation in practice to a single style was felt as a fatal flaw, as similar limitations had never been present in medieval notational systems. That did not prevent its use for the benefit of the musically uneducated: and Tonic Sol-fa merely exemplifies the numerous novel notational systems for vocal music devised from the 16th century onwards for this purpose. These systems are often unconcerned with theoretical abstractions, and thus resemble instrumental tablatures. Most of them were based on popular solmization practice, and many provide the same information in more than one way.

A turning-point in notational practice seems to have occurred in the second half of the 19th century in consequence of the harmonic and rhythmic theory of the period (Moritz Hauptmann, Hugo Riemann and Mathis Lussy). The notational principles outlined, to some extent en passant, by these theorists were popularized in Germany, France and Britain and may have laid the foundations for a number of details of modern notational theory and practice. In particular, the rules for orthography in accidentals and in rhythmic notation (with slurs and beams) came under close scrutiny, with attempts to abolish the less theoretically justifiable aspects of notation in the 18th century and the early 19th. The heavily edited versions of Classical works produced by Riemann and others may well represent attempts at transcription into a new notational language, rather than arbitrary suppression of the composer’s wishes in favour of the editor’s; perhaps for that reason, some scholars opposed the concept of the Urtext edition, holding that the careless adoption of obsolete and hence misleading notational conventions was indefensible.

The notation evolved by Riemann and Lussy, precise as it is in rhythmic detail, well deserves the title of ‘orthochronic’ notation (an equivalent term was coined by Chailley, 1950): note shapes uniquely fix durational relationships between notes, and there are no subdivisions of notes other than duple unless specially indicated. However, the extension of this term to all notation since the 16th century seems arbitrary, since no account is then taken of the numerous conventions whereby rhythms intended in performance were not explicitly indicated in the score. These conventions, including the occasional anomalous triple subdivision of note values, were widespread until the last third of the 19th century, and may be found in much music (though not the bulk of the repertory) even later than that. The term ‘orthochronic’ is, accordingly, avoided here in favour of the more comprehensive term ‘mensural’, which may legitimately be used wherever note shapes are directly related – even if only vaguely or notionally – to the durations of notes in performance; in other words, to almost all notation in the mainstream repertory, classical or popular, except tablature, from Franco of Cologne to the present.

In the 20th century proposals for notational reform by professional notators and experiments in notation by composers greatly increased. Where these are not simply arbitrary, they represent to some extent further developments of the notation of the late 19th century, with further extensions of the capacity of mensural notation to carry large quantities of information; they may be seen as new departures reflecting the new ideas underlying the music. With the rise of historical musicology and ethnomusicology, notation has been faced with new problems in the attempt to use it to represent material originally designed for another, or no, notational system. In ethnomusicology, notation has become for almost the first time on any large scale descriptive rather than prescriptive. Since most musical works notated in the 20th century were tonal and traditional in style, whether editions of old music or new compositions, only certain universally useful devices, such as the representation of durations proportionally by the spacing and alignment of notes, gained universal currency.

The fullest discussion of the history of Western notation, copiously illustrated, is to be found in the two volumes of Wolf’s Handbuch der Notationskunde (1913–19/R), to which the reader is referred for more detailed information; a shorter survey is Rastall’s The Notation of Western Music (1983, rev. 2/1998). Apel’s Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900–1600 (1942, rev. 5/1961) is also valuable for medieval and Renaissance notations. For information on recent notational usage the volumes by Read (1964 and 1978), Karkoschka (Schriftbild, 1966) and Risatti (1975) may be found helpful.

Notation, §III, 4: Mensural notation from 1500