music notation history (books, articles, etc)

[iranzi]

Hi, can anyone think of any good books on music notation history?
I’m sure there’s a long wiki page about it, but i’d prefer a book…

the following would be great but not obligatory:

i’m particularly interested in any texts that look at score and score-writing as a distinct form of craft/art; that looks at it not only in its connection with music as such, but considers the similarities with such fields as (apologies, it’s a messy, approximate list at the moment, done in a hurry):

architectural/ technical drawing, drafting,
technical writing
scientific & conceptual modelling,
scale modelling, prototyping,
maquette, sketch, mockup …

Would be really interested in such history book!
And in your thoughts!
Does this make any sense at all?
(I’ve worked with scores very little, so not feeling at home when confronted by a page of sheet music…)

[LeTromboniste]

This is not cheap, and only available in German, but it is certainly one of the most comprehensive works on the western classical music notation systems and their development. It doesn't just give a historical overview of what changes happened when and how we got to today's notation, but really goes into the nitty gritty of how each system (and stage of development) works, how one reads it, what information is presented and how, and how that relates to the music theory and conception of the time.

https://schwabe.ch/karin-paulsmeier-not ... 20-5?c=657

I'm not sure to what extent comparisons between musical notation's development with that of the other types of documentation you mention would be revealing. I might very well be wrong but my guess is that any connections and parallels would be superficial at best.

[AtomicClock]

There may be parallels in the penmanship (including the history of pen and paper) or typesetting worlds.

[iranzi]

There may be parallels in the penmanship (including the history of pen and paper) or typesetting worlds.

Thank you for your suggestions!
I'm sorry guys, i'll need to rephrase the original question, i didn't properly think it through before posting (i'm so useless at this social media thing...).

Penmanship & typesetting sound absolutely fascinating!!!
I actually had a brief obsession with penmanship some time back. Wanted to master Spencerian script and then make it my own (nothing came of it, but i still have all the nibs and the study materials from some US Spencerian guru...).
My friends, the freaks, thought i went mad and were making fun of me, re: learning to write all over again...
Gave me an old primary school desk as a present, so small only a child could use it. With a hole in the middle for an inkwell...

History of pen and paper are also right up my street!
They do a short papermaking course at the paper shop in central london. One day i'll sign up for it...

I'll try to formulate and post the sheet music question tomorrow or the day after. I have a feeling you'll be able to sort this one out and there won't be any books needed

[iranzi]

The German book sounds amazing! (always wanted to learn German anyway. could probably read it very very slowly, with the dictionary. plus my German best friend may be willing to help).
But 6 volumes!? That’s overkill ….. i love it!

I actually had a different idea for this thread, but got sidetracked before i could formulate it. The idea was to look at sheet music and its history (and also, by extension, at music notation) and try to understand what category of human activity it belongs to. It comes from something John Tilbury said a while back (i think it was him, the old contrarian). To a youngish student it sounded really cool, and i had no clue what it meant — perfect for showing off at the pub (i'm still at it, only moved online ).
It was something along the lines of: sheet music has more in common with literature than with music. It’s a genre of literature, something like that…

Ok, the rest is all provisional. Please blow holes in it or obliterate it completely as you see fit…

Yesterday it occurred to me that there are strong similarities between the two: both use written notations that are made to be (or can be) read aloud, i.e. reproduced in sound form.
Writing and organising written material on the page is also similar to both. And this leads to similarities in the structures of both (different to structures of those things that reproduce via oral traditions., i.e. writing allows for more evolved structuring compared to e.g. verse-chorus structures in oral traditions) < this sounds like simplifying & generalising. I just don’t know enough n the subject…

The list that i originally put together, with architectural drawings and other wild things, is probably not even relevant here. I just thought it a good idea to throw the net over as large an area as i could. But that is for much much later.

from this fascinating wiki page on "Eye Movement In Music Reading". The section "Relationship with eye movement in language reading" (ah yes, language. language & music are the key players really, but i was hoping to place them temporarily outside the frame of reference, as a theoretical exercise)

anyway— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movem ... ic_reading

" Eye movement in music reading may at first appear to be similar to that in language reading, since in both activities the eyes move over the page in fixations and saccades, picking up and processing coded meanings. However, it is here that the obvious similarities end. Not only is the coding system of music nonlinguistic; it involves what is apparently a unique combination of features among human activities: a strict and continuous time constraint on an output that is generated by a continuous stream of coded instructions. Even the reading of language aloud, which, like musical performance involves turning coded information into a musculoskeletal response, is relatively free of temporal constraint―the pulse in reading aloud is a fluid, improvised affair compared with its rigid presence in most Western music. It is this uniquely strict temporal requirement in musical performance that has made the observation of eye movement in music reading fraught with more difficulty than that in language reading.
Another critical difference between reading music and reading language is the role of skill. Most people become reasonably efficient at language reading by adulthood, even though almost all language reading is sight reading.[3] By contrast, some musicians regard themselves as poor sight readers of music even after years of study. Thus, the improvement of music sight reading and the differences between skilled and unskilled readers have always been of prime importance to research into eye movement in music reading, whereas research into eye movement in language reading has been more concerned with the development of a unified psychological model of the reading process.[4] It is therefore unsurprising that most research into eye movement in music reading has aimed to compare the eye movement patterns of the skilled and the unskilled. "

There is a long Sheet Music page on wikipedia, and a Musical Notation page, also long.

I'm not expecting any heated discussion btw. I know it's a very niche concern. Most people have other, actually important things to deal with.

[LeTromboniste]

Ah, yes different direction.

I would say that yes, written language and written music have much in common, which makes sense since music can very well be argued to be a form of language. And yes, they both have essentially the same origin: to be able to keep records of, and eventually disseminate, ideas that another person who speaks the language and is literate can read and understand (i.e. they don't need to actually be read aloud to be understandable to the reader, one can read in silence just as one can audiate music), and also can speak/sound aloud and have others around them hear and understand without seeing/reading.

It's also interesting that Western music notation started off as simply an extra layer of information added to written language, indicating variations of pitch while singing words. You'd have little lines (neumes) around the written words to give you the basic information about pitch. It evolved from there to carry more and more information, and music in turn evolved to take advantage of new parameters that were now codified. But one could argue that music notation is in essence only an extension of written text.

I find some problems with the quotes from the eye movement article. First, I would thoroughly disagree that music notation is nonlinguistic. Music has spelling and grammar and syntax, and vocabulary, just as any language. Second, music notation doesn't have a strict and continuous time constraint, that's just false. It can and often does carry rhythm (relative lengths), but it inherently carries absolutely no meaning with regard to tempo (speed and the overall time constraint). The inclusion of rhythm in notation is because rhythm is a more important parameter of music than it is of speech. However, music doesn't always have strict rhythm that needs to be codified or that can even be accurately notated, and on the other hand speech absolutely can have rhythm, the notation just happens to not have evolved to include it. But as someone whose mother tongue has very little notions of rhythm and stresses, even now that my English is essentially at a native speaker level and that I don't have much of an accent, that's still the number one thing that will still trip me up and be a giveaway to native speakers that I am actually not one: there is a rhythm to the language and stresses within words that are non-written rules and conventions. They are not notated on the paper, but a truly fully fluent speaker knows them, and they are a part of the language. A musical parallel could be drawn in mensural notation, where the same note value could indicate different lengths depending on context, or in French baroque musicians or 20th century Jazz musicians whose stylistic conventions evolved to give equally written rhythms a level of rhythmic inequality that can reach the point where it could be notated as an entirely different rhythm. The last part about the importance of skill is also to me misguided. The truth is that we learn language from the moment we are born, and we use it continuously, every minute of every day (when not talking, listening, reading or writing, we are thinking in the language), and even at night in our dreams. We start learning music years later, and use the language only a few hours per day at most. So even as a professional musician, the level of fluency with the musical language will never come close to rivaling the level of of fluency with our mother tongue. Its not that reading music requires more skill or training so much as it's impossible to have as much training in reading music than we have in language. Go back to times where musicians were learning from extremely young ages and practiced music in all its forms all day every day, and I'd bet the average choirboy could run circles around a lot of professional musicians of today. Just a very rough example: to become a choirmaster in Renaissance and baroque Spain, one had to be able to sight-improvise 4-part music from one written part, singing one voice, while saying the solemnization syllables of another (that choristers could follow and sing accordingly) and showing one voice in each hand (using the Guidonian hand, that choristers could read and sing).

[BGuttman]

While Guido of Arezzo is generally given credit for the invention of musical notation, Jewish sacred texts contained "tropes" as an indication of the melody by which the text is to be sung. This goes back to around 550 BCE, when what is now called the "Old Testament" was compiled.

An example of text with tropes is with two tropes indicated.

[LeTromboniste]

While Guido of Arezzo is generally given credit for the invention of musical notation, Jewish sacred texts contained "tropes" as an indication of the melody by which the text is to be sung. This goes back to around 550 BCE, when what is now called the "Old Testament" was compiled.

An example of text with tropes is with two tropes indicated.

Guido d'Arezzo is usually credited with the early development of staff notation. Use of neumes even in Western music predate him by a couple centuries at least. He for sure didn't invent them.

I was taught that these kind of devices start appearing in Aramaic and Hebrew sources and in Islamic texts all roughly around the 7th century CE, but that might not have been correct.

[iranzi]

[...] Western music notation
[...] evolved from there to carry more and more information, and music in turn evolved to take advantage of new parameters that were now codified.

i really like this mutual influencing that propells the whole thing forward! (like the essential building material of history)

[...] speech absolutely can have rhythm[...]

thank you !! this fact has been a huge impact on me as a musician
there's this rapper's song in Darija (Moroccan Arabic, but could be Martian) that's been an inexhaustible source for rhythmic speech/music investigations for me (definitely speech/utterance patterns, but also on a micro level, the interplay between different types of consonants and the fleeting rhythms they create). Here in particular, these micro-rhythms are absolutely vertiginous: 'Rainbow' by Krtas'Nssa (from 2017).
I'm so taken by the vocal part that thought to attempt a homophonic translation. Into russian, as it has loan words from languages with similar sounds. Definitely will take ages to complete... I don't understand Darija but it's possible to guess at the meaning and figure out bits inderectly (e.g. via comments under the video, etc...). Really excited about this as it's such an impossible undertaking —figuring out how close you can get by approximating sounds and rhythms of the original, plus making sure the meaning is retained somehow! Should be good for the ear, at the very least...

[...] stylistic conventions evolved to give equally written rhythms a level of rhythmic inequality that can reach the point where it could be notated as an entirely different rhythm.

i’m so overjoyed to see this expressed so precisely!

[...] problems with the quotes from the eye movement article [...]
[...] music notation doesn't have a strict and continuous time constraint, that’s just false [...]
[...] The last part about the importance of skill is also to me misguided [...]
[...] the level of fluency with the musical language will never come close to rivaling the level of of fluency with our mother tongue [...]

That final bit in the wikipedia excerpt, about the relative skills required to master either idiom, i also find them just a bit bizarre!
Funny though, if that’s what has been guiding the eye movement research and funding.
We get:
— for language reading > development of a unified psychological model of the reading process.
― for music reading > compar[ing] the eye movement patterns of the skilled and the unskilled readers.

Here's what i thought on the rest of it, but it may also be wrong:
Music reading skill level is directly proportional to tempos, and reading of e.g. newspapers article is not dependent on metronome markings: so if a poorly skilled music reader lowers the metronome tempo to a minimum, s/he may find themselves (according to this wikipedia argument ) turning into adequately skilled music readers.
And regarding language reading "efficiency" achieved by "adulthood" — what exactly do they mean by "language" here? What about moving to a different lingustic environment, e.g. migrating, when the language reading skills may not yet been aquired (by a migrating adult). Or living in highly multi-lingustic places, or communities, or families, where one and the same adult may have reading skills ranging from perfect to none depending on the language used. Or major languages that exist only in spoken form e.g. Darija in North West Africa (although writing has been emerging recently out of phone SMS messaging: assigning letters & numbers of the standard Latin phone keyboard to the sounds of Darija, including all those weird & beautiful consonants! For how that looks & sounds check out another Krtas'Nssa song 'Madame', same year).

[iranzi]

Some relevant quotes from that eye movement wikipedia bit about reading music & other things (they briefly made sense to me when i put them together) :
— involves a unique combination of features among human activities
— uniquely strict temporal requirement in musical performance
— output that is generated by a continuous stream of coded instructions.
— reading of language aloud, [...] like musical performance = turning coded information into a musculoskeletal response (that’s unnecessary… a what response? __ i’d say convertion/metamorphosis of ideas into writing, into muscle contraction, into air vibration, into audible sound, into cogs rotating differently inside some head somehere, into etc. etc… i can do it all day, even whole weekend (somebody pay me! Also, I am a world class sleeper…)
— the pulse in reading aloud is a fluid, improvised affair compared with its rigid presence in most Western music (fluid improvised affair! When read aloud this phrase becomes so full of ...mysteries)

[iranzi]

[…] music can very well be argued to be a form of language. […]

I love this!
But also so sorry for all the jazzers out there (and the jazz fans like myself): nearly all of our native speakers are dead.
(don’t mean to say there are no more great players left, fluent in jazz, some of them live and breathe it 24/7, some of them on this very forum! not me, obviously. I maybe could stagger through a modal piece; but improvising over chord changes?... i always preferred to admire it from a safe distance. an awe-inspiring art)