Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]

(ii) Notes: shapes, colours, abbreviations.

Void (‘white’) notation (see §3(vii) above), with duple relationships for the most part between note values, and dots (when used for rhythmic purposes) only as dots of addition, was generally (though not universally) adopted by the early 16th century in both vocal and instrumental music, tablatures apart. It was generally adopted by printers from Petrucci onwards, since it was readily adaptable to printing from movable type; in some music, such as popular metrical psalters, this notation survived virtually unchanged for centuries (as in fig.68, a 19th-century metrical psalter). Even when the appearance of the notation changed, the representation of primary (uninflected) pitches by their position on the staff, in the manner established in the Middle Ages, remained unchanged in succeeding centuries except in occasional instances where staff notation was treated as a tablature. The latter may be seen in the modern notation of harmonics on string instruments by finger position rather than by sound, and more strikingly still from the 17th century in Scordatura notation, where the written notes or chords represent finger positions and, since the instrument is abnormally tuned, do not correspond with the sounds. For the notation of accidentals, see §(vi) below.

After 1600 black-full notation (i.e. where the note heads of minims and higher values are black) was never again of great importance, despite the advocacy of such a notation by Lacassagne (1766). It was used for symbolic reasons in some works of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, such as Ockeghem’s Missa ‘mi-mi’, with black-full notes at the word ‘mortuorum’, and J.C. Kerll’s Missa nigra (see Eye music). The opposition of void and full notes was used also in various 20th-century reform proposals, for distinguishing pitches rather than durations (e.g. in Equitone, where full notes are a semitone higher than the equivalent void notes, and in Klavarskribo, where void and full notes correspond with white and black notes on the modern keyboard – see fig.79).

Red notes were still in occasional use at the beginning of the 16th century for distinguishing rhythmic proportions (as in GB-Llp 1, probably dating from the reign of Henry VIII), but dropped out of general use as rhythmic style became simpler; their use would, moreover, have entailed unnecessary expense in music printing. They continued, however, to be described by theorists such as Morley (A Plaine and Easie Introduction, 1597; ed. Harman, pp.114ff), and red and other colours have remained in occasional use to the present day in one of their oldest and simplest uses: to distinguish individual strands of the notation from one another. Red, green and black notes are used for this purpose in the 16th-century manuscript D-Bsb Mus.ms.theor.57, and red and black notes on a single staff in the 18th-century manuscript Bsb Mus.ms.40296. Red is used to distinguish the main melody in 16th-century Spanish lute tablatures (here with red numerals rather than red notes); and the same principle appears in a few late 19th-century editions (fig.69). Dallapiccola used square red notes for a canon whose resolution is printed in normal notation, in the ‘Andantino amoroso e contrapunctus tertius’ from the Quaderno musicale di Annalibera (1952). Other uses of colour include yellow or red for notes subject to chromatic alteration (G.M. Trabaci).

Coloration in a more general sense – full notes used in opposition to void notes for rhythmic purposes – survived in the 16th and 17th centuries especially for expressing hemiola rhythms in 3/2 time, three full semibreves or equivalent replacing two normal void dotted semibreves. The derivation of these full semibreves from 14th- and 15th-century imperfect semibreves is clear, even though redundant dots had been placed after perfect semibreves generally from about 1500; the continuing influence of 15th-century principles may be seen in the omission of dots after ‘perfect’ void semibreves in even so late a source as Caccini’s Euridice of 1600 (fig.70).

Soon after 1600, coloration was used for entire movements in mensural notation, such as courantes, whether or not hemiola rhythms were intended (fig.71a, from Frescobaldi, 1626, where the rests show that the ‘crotchets’ are coloured minims). This practice, derived from tablature notation, may have contributed to the increasing use of the crotchet as the beat; in G.B. Fontana’s practice (1641, fig.71b) crotchet rests are used to correspond to coloured minims, and the semibreve rest is used for a bar’s rest (Riemann, 1910, pp.140ff).

Smaller note values (fusa and semifusa) were increasingly used in the 16th century, owing to, or resulting in, the slowing down of note values in general (see §(iii) below). In the late Middle Ages, a semiminim could be written as a coloured note (red in black notation, black in void notation) with a stem but without a flag, or as a non-coloured note with both stem and flag; this generated a series of smaller note values with alternative forms, the non-coloured forms bearing one more flag than the coloured. These alternative forms remained theoretically available, although the coloured forms (as in modern practice, where a crotchet is the coloured form of the minim) have been generally preferred. This meant, paradoxically, that as small note values were increasingly used, and especially as the semiminim came to represent the beat at the end of the 16th century, ‘void’ notation (i.e. notation in which the minim and larger values were written with white note heads) consisted more and more of black notes.

The non-coloured forms of the semiminim and below, which in the 16th century often occur in sections in fast triple time where the time unit was the semibreve rather than the minim, survived until the 18th century (fig.72, from Couperin). By the time of Couperin almost all the shorter note values used today may be found, mostly in written-out ornamentation; both small and large note values, with corresponding exceptional time signatures, occur for symbolic reasons in Telemann’s Getreuer Music-Meister of 1728 (see Eye music, fig.1). Beethoven used small note values and rests particularly lavishly (fig.73, from the Fantasia op.77). For the grouping of smaller note values by means of beams, and for the continuing use of ligatures, see §(iv) below.

Standard small melodic formulae, mostly of short notes (ornaments), had been abbreviated with special signs in keyboard tablatures from the late Middle Ages onwards, and in medieval vocal music some abbreviations are also found to indicate repeated material (for an example see Isorhythm). The double bar with two (or four) dots to indicate repetition is already found in essence in 15th-century polyphony. A large vocabulary of signs indicating abbreviations of ornaments, not generally precise before the 17th century, was developed in the 18th century, especially in French keyboard and lute music (see Ornaments, §7). Some notators, such as Bach, often preferred to write ornaments out in full, a tendency increasingly evident in the 19th century as improvised ornamentation declined (see Improvisation, §II, 3(iv)). A parallel phenomenon was the increasing reluctance of notators during the 19th century to abbreviate at the repetitions of short phrases, for example in Alberti basses. (For details of special notations for abbreviating repeated notes and figures see Abbreviations.)

The lozenge-shaped notes of many 15th-century sources continued to be used in much printing from movable type (see fig.68 above) and in carefully written manuscripts throughout the 16th century. Rounded note shapes came increasingly to replace them from as early as the 15th century (fig.74, with pear-shaped notes, from I-PEc G.20); no adequate reason seems yet to have been given for this change. Etienne Briard jettisoned the lozenge-shaped notes in favour of oval ones in French printing as early as about 1530, but in England the change did not occur in printing until Carr’s Vinculum societatis (1687; fig.75).

Notes of a smaller than normal size occur in early 19th-century English songs, printed as keyboard music (i.e. with the vocal part and accompaniment notated on two staves rather than three: see §(v) below). The main melody is notated normally, whereas the accompaniment on the upper staff is distinguished by small notes (fig.76). The use of small notes to distinguish ornamentation, alternative versions of passages or other subsidiary material became normal in 19th-century piano music (fig.77, from Chopin’s Prelude op.28 no.8, published in 1839; the proportion of small notes to large is particularly high). The small notes often did not count towards the value of the full bar; sometimes they refer to notes intended to be played very rapidly. (For the use of small notes to represent music without a regular pattern of beats, see §(iii) below.)

Unconventional note shapes, like some coloured notes, have occasionally been used within the normal mensural system for special purposes (see fig.78, with reversed note shapes representing one strand of a complex texture). The problem of differentiating such strands was solved by Schoenberg, on the other hand, by the use of squared slurs joined to the capital letters H (Hauptstimme, principal voice) or N (Nebenstimme, subordinate voice).

Since the reintroduction of the score, and particularly in the 20th century, duration has frequently been related to the horizontal distance between notes, though aesthetic considerations have often led notators to place notes symmetrically between bar-lines, so that arguments about simultaneity cannot usually be settled conclusively by considering alignment. Thus the staff has been treated as the axis of a graph; and, as far as this is true, the indication of duration by note shapes is redundant. Reformers have sometimes attempted to eliminate the redundancy: Hans Wagner (Vereinfachte Notenschrift, 1888) proposed the abolition of all note shapes but the semibreve. The Equitone and Klavarskribo systems have attempted the same: duration is related to the distance between notes, and note shapes are used to represent pitch (fig.79).

Other proposals for changing or abolishing the mensural note shapes, up to the late 19th century, have generally been of little practical significance. Examples are the 15th-century proposals of Giorgio Anselmi to distinguish durations by ascending and descending stems variously applied to a void breve shape (Gaffurius, Practica musice, 1496, ii, chap.4) and, as one of the first efforts to devise a thoroughly reformed notation, J. van der Elst’s series of somewhat complex note shapes (fig.80, from Notae Augustinianae, 1657; see also his Den ouden ende nieuwen grondt van de musijcke, 1662) for both vocal and instrumental notation. Another unsuccessful reform, that of Sauveur (Système général des intervalles des sons, 1701), attempted to give each pitch a distinctive note shape, and may thus be seen as a forerunner of the 19th-century shape-note system (see §5(iv) below; the shape-notes were taken up and used in a different sense by Cowell: see §(iii) below). (For details of other reforms, see Wolf, 1919, 335ff; for novel note shapes representing various durations, see Risatti, 1975, pp.1ff.)

For chords including several adjacent semitones, notated on a single staff, traditional mensural notation is inadequate, allowing as it does only for two vertical groups of notes a 3rd apart, either side of the stem. From the early 20th century such chords were notated with supplementary diagonal stems branching from the common stem, by means of which the chords could include three vertical groups of notes. The extension of such chords into clusters suggested the adoption of abbreviated signs, notably those of Henry Cowell (fig.81), which have been adapted also to represent sustained clusters (see fig.82 and Risatti, 1975, pp.26–7, 36).

Notation, §III, 4: Mensural notation from 1500