After break more or less forced, perhaps for the Tortuga's guilt, it was decided to bring a short written about music, and as it should according to her the first of many (we are not sure though), the seemed appropriate to start from, say, away.
THOUSAND AND ONE NOTE
The foundations of modern notation.
it took about ten years. Ten years of laborious and methodical store songs for the liturgy, a really huge effort. The Craft Master Cantore, until the development of a notation that would actively act as a "tonic mnemonic", consisted of the systematic and voracious assimilation of songs and melodic fragments in order to secure the future of the tradition of the chant.
Christian chant of the West, therefore, developed for centuries after the Christ event, without any recourse to formalize written into the register. The first official documents to have survived that demonstrate that this practice be traced back roughly 150 years earlier in the year one thousand, although in all probability the Primicerio the Meistersinger, signs began to put music on parchment, for their own use and consumption, many years before.
The information used to reproduce the gesture with his hand to indicate to make the ascent or descent of the melody. This gesture, called technically "chironomico" transcoded was written mainly using punctuation marks, the syllables of the text were sovrappostedelle rough indication on the pitch, claims which were named " neumes .
The "notation neumatic" assumed geographic characterizations markedly and was linked to the will of the privileged maggiormante precision in the height of the notes (derivation Aquitaine school) rather than the evolution of rhythm and expressive nuances (St. Gallen), in any case, given the mere support function to a purely oral tradition, we took care to remind the singer only the particular sophistication of interpretation that even a prodigious memory could not observed.
The level of approximate notation neumatic was the beginning, extremely high. The punctuation marks which appear on the syllables of the text, were in "open field", ie without any reference that could afford to express something assolutomriguardo the height of the notes. This type of notation called "neumatic adiastematica" could only indicate whether the melody lines for large, than original intonation, ascended or descended. To be able to say "what extent" was moving, it would take references.
The initial idea was to put a line around which to place the signs. With the adoption of the line as a reference, the notation, which was now in a position to say anything more against the intervals between notes, became "intervallic". In the final configuration of the evolution of "diastemanzia" led to the adoption of four lines. The systematization of these techniques occurred during the eleventh through the intervention of a Benedictine monano born in Talla, near Arezzo, and from this area of \u200b\u200bthe Casentino was named.
Guido d'Arezzo, in which music had more merit than those relating to the development in the notation, did nothing, the Treaty refers to the appearance on the coordination of the suggestions and attempts made in different geographical areas by disseminating the essence, the summary of the different acquired knowledge. His system of notation was explained in Prolugus in Antiphonarium, this system provided for the adoption of the "tetragrammaton " and the division of it on a scale showing the internal parts or musical phrases to them.
the need was not yet ripe, however, to indicate the exact length of known by virtue of the fact that the song " monodic " posed no problem of "coordination" between different voices. Basically with the advent of polyphony irrunciabile become a system that can enable different voices to coordinate precise in using the "clock", and to build this rhythmic mechanism will need to define the unit of measurement basis on which all the scaffold construction.
Guido d'Arezzo, however, assumed a major role in the music of the Middle Ages for another two basic important innovations. First, the so-called salmisazione summed up in a brilliant mnemonics procedure in order to facilitate the singers in the intonation of the interval of a semitone.
Another important innovation introduced by Guido concerned the invention of musical notes. The trick mnemotechnical invented to remember the exact pitch of the notes was based on certain syllables of the first stanza of ' liturgical hymn in honor of St. John the Baptist :
" UT laxis quaent - Re fibris sounding - I ra gestorum -
FA mules tuorum - SOL ve chickens - THE bii rearum - S ancte I Ohannes.
Guido known as the issuing of this verse began to form an ordered sequence of intervals of tones and semitones. The first syllables of each hemistich allowed to sing an ascending series of six notes (series called "hexachord"), they became the names of the notes:
ut - re-mi - do - sol - la-you.
it was introduced in 1482 by Bartolomeo Ramis de Pareja, while the transition from ut to do is attributed to Giovanni Battista Doni , who had used the first syllable of his surname.
The foundations of modern notation had been placed.
Enzo Carlucci
article that appeared in "Medi extra virgin olive oil", No. 33 October 1999
