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Musical Notation

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We as thinking beings are consistently obsessed with exploration and defining everything in the world. Constantly trying to answer why and how, we make a name a put a system to all the things we discover. Music is not special to this method of defining. Once we discovered the sound of music, it was decided that it must have a name or a way to be taught to others. Thus, musical notation was created.
Musical notation is defined as a system of symbols used to make a written record of musical sounds. In very early Grecian music two different systems of letters were used. One system was to write down the instrumental and the second system for the vocal music. This eventually becomes similar to a movie score. In his five textbooks on music theory …show more content…

By the end of the 12th century the staff which had since been perfected by Guido d'Arezzo was in use. Guido placed letters on certain lines to indicate their pitch, and thus the pitches of the remaining lines and spaces fell into place. The letters evolved into the Bass clef, Treble clef, and the Alto clef signs used today. Guido also invented a system of naming scales using the initial syllables of the lines of a Latin hymn also known as solfege ( Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La). Originally used for teaching sight singing, these or their derivatives are also used in some languages for naming absolute …show more content…

Measurable notation, in which each note has a specific time value, became a necessity. At first, certain patterns of neumes were used to represent the various rhythmic modes; later, in his Ars cantus mensurabilis (c.1280), Franco of Cologne created a clear indication for each note of its exact rhythmic length and selected certain neumes to represent tones of long and short duration. In his system, the long value was in principle equal to three of the short values. In the 14th century Philippe de Vitry, author of Ars nova, which expands the system of Franco, arranged the ready availability of duple divisions of the long and short notes (Apel). At the various rhythmic levels of a given piece either a 2:1 or a 3:1 relationship was implied, and a system of signs and colored notes was developed for indicating which relationships were in force or were being temporarily

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