Summary
Music has been made since time immemorial, and for the majority of its existence this music has been handed down orally. People listened to each other and sang or played based on what they had heard. Thus as listening and learning, music has been transferred from generation to generation for centuries. On occasion, musicians might have had support in the form of symbols that show whether the musical line rises or falls, or that uses a letter code for the tones, or through symbols that indicate fingerings for performance on an instrument. Long before the commencement of our calendar, the Chinese, Sumerians and Babylonians, Egyptians, Hebrews and ancient Greeks knew about these kinds of music notation.
Moreover, hieroglyphics show that the Egyptians also had a more physical and visual means of communicating symbols, whereby signals could be given with the arm, hand and fingers in gestures that must have been sufficient for singers to perform music together. Although this cheironomy is not written notation and the hieroglyphics serve as a report of a specific event rather than a score, these could serve as a musical record for us, given some knowledge of the meanings of the symbols (see fig. 9).
Each of these early notation techniques provide symbols (figures, letters or the depicted hand position) for the note which should be sung, the direction in which a melody should go, or which fingerings need to be used on an instrument, as for instance in notation for the Chinese zither, the ch’in. It was not until the 9th century AD that there was any substantial change in this, when the first methods were developed to preserve the music of the liturgical chants of the Church of Rome, of plainchant or Gregorian chant. These forms of notation, also called neumes, are in some ways comparable to the manner in which so-called ekphonetic notation was applied to Hebrew and Byzantine texts. Here, the shape of a musical phrase was indicated with a set of dots and dashes that floated freely above the text that was to be sung (see fig. 10).
Neumatic notation became increasingly complex, however.
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- Meaning of Music , pp. 84 - 90Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016